Citation: CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1992
JAMES ROSS MCFARLANE
to be Doctor of Science

Jim McFarlane has had two careers since he graduated from UNB with a mechanical engineering degree in 1960, and both careers have permitted him to follow his love of the sea and his fascination with the technology of submarines. In the first, he was a member of the Canadian Navy and in the second, a successful businessman whose company, International Submarine Engineering Ltd., designs and constructs small remotely operated or autonomous submarines.

His naval career dates from his years as a student here, and also embraces time spent pursuing degrees in naval engineering, naval architecture, and marine engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the Navy, he assumed technical responsibilities related to the Canadian Oberon Class submarines built in England during the 1960s. When he left the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander, he joined International Hydrodynamics as vice president of engineering and operations. Here, he took responsibility for the development of the company's submersibles including their launch and recovery systems.

By 1974, however, he was ready to venture out on his own, founding ISE to design and build a variety of remotely operated submersibles of the sort used in the offshore petroleum industry. With experience and success, the company branched out into other projects, including underwater machines used in hydrographic survey work, the search for downed airliners, or the observation of marine animals. His company is located in Port Coquitlam, B.C. There, in his role as president of the company, he has carved out a niche for himself in the business life of the province while responding to calls for his expertise from across Canada. He has served on numerous federal and provincial task forces on oceans, technology and innovation, and economic development. He has won awards from universities, professional associations, and government. His technical articles and his lecturing ability have put him in demand as a speaker and as a visiting scholar. In recognition of his many outstanding contributions to his community, his profession, and to business, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1989.

Jim McFarlane has had a busy life since his student days at UNB, and his career has brought distinction not only to himself but also to his alma mater. It is therefore both timely and appropriate for us to join the many others who have recognized his achievement by conferring upon him the University's highest honour.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 3

Citations may be reproduced for research purposes only. Publication in whole or in part requires written permission
from the author.

Your Honour, Madame Chancellor, distinguished platform guests, members of faculty and staff, ladies and gentlemen: This is the fall convocation of the University. The principal function of a convocation like this is usually to award degrees to the students, both graduates and undergraduates, who have completed successfully their studies and research. I congratulate all the students who have graduated this afternoon. I also congratulate their families and their friends who have contributed to their success and provided invaluable support.

It may seem to be a cliché to speak to graduates entering a troubled world. Successive generations of graduates have faced and met differing problems. When my generation graduated from university we were in the midst of the Second World War and the outlook was very bleak – but, we met those challenges and persevered.

Today our world faces different but serious challenges – major environmental problems, increasing societal violence and the spectre of AIDS. There will be ample prospect in the future for applying the skills of the graduates – skills in science, engineering, the arts and other studies acquired at university. I am confident that you will be equal to the task.

Today is a very significant day for me, as well as for the graduates in course. The University has awarded me the degree of Doctor of Civil Law honoris causa. I am deeply grateful to the Governors and to the Senate. It is a particular honour to receive this Degree at a Convocation being held to commemorate the founding of the Law School.

I realize that the Degree was awarded not only because of my attachment to the University but for other reasons as well, my service on the Federal Court of Appeal, for example. May I say, however, that I personally will regard the degree as recognition in main part of my career as a teacher. The most gratifying part of my career, the part for which I had the greatest affection, were the years I spent on the lecture platform, teaching, and engaging students in Socratic dialogue.

The life has been so intimately interwoven with the University and more particularly the Law School. I entered the University in 1938 as an Arts Student. I later took my law degree at the University. After doing graduate work, I joined the Faculty of Law as a full-time member. I served on the Faculty for twenty-one years, fifteen years as Dean of Law. My attachment to the University and the School is not only intellectual, it is emotional.

This Convocation has a special feature. It commemorates the University’s Law Centennial, that is to say the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Faculty of Law.

The Law School had an important reason for its founding. Before the Law Faculty was established, law in New Brunswick was not taught in university. Lawyers became lawyers by serving as apprentices. The founders of our Law School made an important, and I believe correct decision to found it as a university faculty. It has its beginnings in Saint John as a faculty of King’s College which itself was located in Windsor, Nova Scotia. In 1923, as a result of a university reorganization, King’s College transferred to Halifax. The Law School became a Faculty of the University of New Brunswick but continued to be located in Saint John. Between 1956 and 1958 the registration had fallen to twenty-eight. The President of the University of New Brunswick, Colin Mackay made the courageous decision to integrate the Faculty even more closely with the University. Accordingly, the Law School was transferred to Fredericton.

The School has had many ups and downs. Was it really worth founding? Look at the situation as it is now. When I was appointed Dean in 1956, I ventured to express the hope that the Law Faculty would in time become a significant middle power in Canadian legal education. We have become at least that and, I suspect, a good deal more. Look at the situation now. From a one classroom school in the old provincial building in Saint John, we now have Ludlow Hall, an excellent Law building on the University campus in Fredericton. We have a new and expanded library. Instead of the twenty-eight or so students who were enrolled when I became Dean, we now have about two hundred and forty students. Instead of a full-time faculty of three, we now have twenty professors. Instead of no professors when I was appointed, we now have the Mary Louise Lynch Chair in Women and Law with a full-time professor, Dr. Patricia Hughes in the chair. I am so very pleased that the chair is named for Mary Louise Lynch. I remember when we were still in Saint John, she was Secretary and Registrar of the Faculty and she has contributed so much to the University through her service on the Board of Governors. There are so many people who have made significant contributions to the law school and their efforts have been worth it. The results can be seen in our graduates – graduates who have distinguished themselves as practitioners, legal educators, in the world of business, as high political office holders and as members of the judiciary at every level, including the Supreme Court of Canada.

However, success is not merely a matter of counting buildings or people. It is a spiritual thing as well. One need spend only a few days at Ludlow Hall in order to feel the vibrant spirit of the students and faculty.

We are now about to move into our second century. Once again I am confident of our further progress. And I am confident that we will remain loyal to our dedication to law as a learned profession operating within a university and with university traditions.

I once taught Jurisprudence and I remember St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of law. He defined law as “a rule of reason for the common good.” He thus emphasized the requirement that law should be reasonable and that it should be for the common good, for the good of society as a whole, not as a way of promoting particular interests within the community. We at the Law School must follow this definition in our second century. However, this sentiment is relevant to all graduates, regardless of discipline, and for that matter all members of society.

Graduates, you enter a world that moves at an extremely fast pace (much faster than when I graduated). Your mettle will be tested to the full. You will be expected to disseminate voluminous amounts of data and information, readily available on computer disks, via fax machines and from satellite dishes. You will be placed under pressure to respond quickly with answers and opinions using speedy information tools.

I would urge you not to get caught up in “the race” to the detriment of thoroughness, contemplation, and reason.

As mentioned earlier, my most pleasant memories of my teaching days are of posing questions, stimulating debate, and stirring students to think!

The skills of analysis, the ability to ask the right question, knowing how to work your way through a problem, having the confidence to take a position because it is based on reason, will hold you in good stead. I can assure you that these things that you have learned at University, many of which may not even be apparent, will serve you well the rest of your life.

Adlai Stevenson, an academic and significant United States political figure from my era, in an address to the graduates at Princeton, made reference to the essential “spiritual element” of university life which I feel is existent at the UNB Faculty of Law and the University as a whole. The message was relevant when first made by Mr. Stevenson and I believe it is apt today:
Don’t be afraid of being out of tune with your environment. The idea which underlies this university – any university – is greater than any of its physical manifestations; its classrooms, its laboratories, its clubs, its athletic plant, even the particular groups of Faculty and Students who make up its human element at any given time. What is this idea? It is that the highest condition of man in this mysterious universe is the freedom of the spirit. And it is only truth that can set the spirit free. Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. Don’t forget when you leave why you came.

I would like to begin by setting the record straight by admitting that I belong in the "spouses" category, since like all of those in this group, with the exception of the cases where inbreeding has taken place, I am not a U.N.B. graduate, I only work here.

I have another confession to make. Shortly after I arrived on March 1, I made several blunders. But probably none was more serious than my misunderstanding of the relation of the U.N.B. Associated Alumni and Associated Alumnae organizations to the university. In looking over the organizational chart I was delighted to see that there was a Director of Alumni Affairs, Arthur Doyle, marvellous!! Hard on the heels of this discovery came the good news that your contributions to the 1972 campaigns seemed to be heading for a record...Which they did, reaching $77,600 by March, representing a 60% increase in donations and a 43% increase in the number of donors, this was even more marvellous!!

Now.... how to spend the money?? I thought hard and long about this. No end of possibilities occurred to me. What did not occur to me was the question of implementation. After all, Mr. Doyle, in his box below mine in the organizational chart, ultimately reported directly to me. He would follow my instructions. By now, I have no doubt many of you have begun to realize wherein I was wandering astray. I was like the new man the city hired to collect the dimes from the parking meters. "Here is a master key" said the city manager. "Go around and collect all the coin boxes, get all the money." The new collector was gone two weeks. He walked into the office and said "Can I have another key? I lost the one you gave me." "Sure" said the city manager. "But say, where have you been? Last Friday the cashier stayed here till seven o'clock in the evening to give you your wages." "Wages?" said the new collector, "Do I get wages too?"

Well, like the new collector, no one ever told me that the money the Alumni raised was not mine to spend,... That it belonged to the two Alumni Associations in proportion to the amount each had raised.

It turns out, however, that my blunder was perhaps more imagined than real.... Because I was soon to learn that in fact, that is to say in practice, the Alumni Associations work very closely with the administration. There is considerable consultation between your executives, mostly channelled through Mr. Doyle's office, and the university before final recommendations are send to your respective alumni councils for approval. As a consequence, the way in which your funds are spent is very much in keeping with the aims and objectives of the university.

There is no question therefore, that U.N.B.'s two Alumni Associations play a vital role in the university. I think what pleases me even more, though, is the knowledge that their role is an integral one, meshing completely with the operation of the university as a whole. Under the circumstances, therefore, the title of my remarks this evening "The Role of the Modern Alumni" is of considerable direct interest to me.

Well.... what is your role? That is, of course, for you to decide. But I have some thoughts that you might find useful.

I sense that Alumni Associations in general are facing an identity crisis. Somehow the old rules don't seem to have the same relevance. If it is any comfort to you..."Welcome aboard." Universities are having their identity problems too. I realize that nothing is more tiresome than to have to listen to somebody else's problems. But I am going to tell you some of ours, one in particular (dealing with how we are financed), because what will emerge is an exciting new role for alumni organizations.

We're in financial trouble. I wonder how many presidents over the years have uttered that dire pronouncement. But this time it is different. When I say "we" I don't mean just U.N.B., I mean universities in general.

We find ourself in our present predicament because of two fundamental, and interrelated, facts. One is the shortfall in students experienced by universities across Canada last year. For example, at U.N.B. last fall we were expecting, and therefore budgeting for, an increase in three hundred students. In reality we had a decrease of two hundred students, which for accounting purposes meant a drop of five hundred. In fees alone that represented $300,000 deficit. I must emphasize here that all of us in the university business recognize that the real problem is not the loss in revenue. It was why the expected freshmen did not turn up, and so many of the sophomores and juniors did not return. Perhaps universities are not measuring up to students needs. If so, that to me is as serious a problem as any university can have. All universities are looking closely at their programs these days to see if they need modernizing. It is clear, however, that there will be no instant solutions to enrollment problems.

The second, and the really fundamental, reason why we are in money trouble, is I think amenable to rapid solution. The reason is "formula financing"; and it is this that I think offers new hope to alumni.

You should be aware that formula financing (the system whereby operating funds are allocated to universities by government on a per student basis, the actual amount depending upon several factors such as course enrolled in, whether graduate or undergraduate, etc) is a unique phenomenon. Nothing like it has happened before in the
approximate 800 year history of universities in the western world. Now it is with us to stay, it was introduced in response to the very real need to rationalize the expenditure of public funds on our public universities and colleges. It was said, and it is true, that "universities are spending institutions.... and there is no upper limit, within reason, to what they can usefully spend on improved teaching, more extensive research and the facilities which these functions involve". This is another way of saying that you cannot base educational planning on cost/benefit analyses. Formula financing was government's answer.

What went wrong? For the first few years, nothing. Disaster struck only when the unexpected happened… When the students did not show up. The trouble was that the formulae had all been based on continued growth of universities, no one had thought to build the proper checks into the formulae to take care of a no-growth situation, it is worth noting that universities seem to be the first major "industries" to experience limits to economic growth, an event which many prominent individuals around the world, such as the members of the Club of Rome, claim must happen to all industries, on a global scale, if man is to survive. Those of us in the knowledge industry, that is the university, can now better appreciate the concern that economists have expressed on the effect of a no-growth economy on private enterprise. The effect was certainly disasterous on the university. But I have already made it clear that universities are different than big business, and because of this difference, there should be no difficulty whatever in rapidly adjusting the formulae to the realities of student enrollment. This is happening across Canada now. Already the prospects for 1974-75 (the soonest that remedial action can be taken for universities in New Brunswick) appear brighter.

I have digressed.... but for a purpose. I wanted you to understand the nature of formula financing, because you will recall I indicated that it has special significance to alumni organizations. Now.... to make my point.

Formula financing will put us, for the first time, more or less on equal financial footing for our basic operating costs with our sister institutions across Canada. And therein lies the challenge...For the university as well as for the alumni. We can now plan realistically to develop excellence in those areas that we choose; and expect realistically to achieve it. We'll all be starting from the same base. Whether or not we excel in what we do will, I think, depend to a large extent upon our ability to obtain external support.

Often it does not require much added support to tip the balance so that the ordinary program becomes the exceptional one. Your support of the Urban Studies Programme at U.N.B.S.J. is a perfect example of the kind of extra support that can tip the balance in favour of excellence.

I think we will find that one of the most unexpected consequences of. formula financing will be to make the alumni one of the key factors in determining those areas where universities will develop special competence and excellence, this is not, of course, an entirely new rule for alumni. Excellence in inter-collegiate athletics has long been an alumni objective on many campuses. Now formula financing gives alumni an opportunity to help the university put together a winning team on the academic playing field.

Of course, money is not everything. I was at Carleton University, in its early days, when the alumni were so young they were all still paying off their undergraduate debts. President Davidson Dunton used to liken the fund raising capability of his small band of recent graduates to the story told of Groucho Marx who was reputed to have
said "When I first came to this country I didn't have a nickel in my pocket. Now I have a nickel." But the Carleton graduates were effective because they were organized and did much in the community to support their alma mater. Just by existing, therefore, U.N.B. alumni organizations in various communities in New Brunswick, and other provinces in Canada, can assist U.N.B. in a variety of ways… All depending upon organization, and of course hard work. I think for example of the possibility of alumni helping graduates in identifying job opportunities, becoming involved in public relations, high school liaison, and assisting U.N.B. in major fund raising campaigns (when we get around to this again), by helping U.N.B. obtaining contributions from large corporations.

The alumni can also assist the university in another very important way. I refer to the Alumni Appointees (of which U.N.B. has three) to the board of governors. They bring points of view to our deliberations which could only come from former students. As such their input is invaluable. Through board membership the alumni therefore plays a very important role in policy making,

In summary then, I see the alumni playing three roles; assisting the university achieve excellence in special programmes, assisting the university in various ways simply by being organized; and providing a voice on the board of governors. All are important.... indeed so much so that the importance to ascribe to the contribution that each may bring to the operation of the university may depend upon one's point of view. It is, in conclusion, not unlike the story told about the announcements of the chemistry professor's new book, and his wife's new baby, which appeared almost simultaneously, the professor, when he was congratulated by a friend upon "that proud event in your family'', naturally thought of that achievement which had cost him the greater effort and modestly replied: "Well, I could not have done it without the help of two graduate students."

President Anderson, Distinguished Guests, Friends of the University, and particularly, Members of the Graduating Class. This Encaenia and Commencement will remain for you a memorable occasion. It is a vantage point for looking backward and looking forward. It is a happy and joyous occasion. Warm congratulations and the highest commendation are due to the members of the graduating class for your accomplishment. I would also like to congratulate your parents, for in every case it required effort and sacrifice of some degree to see you through this day. And incidentally, welcome to the Establishment.

What does one of my generation say to your generation which would be meaningful and helpful in the days ahead? At my Commencement in 1926, the speaker was able to hold forth the prospect of a limitless future of "bigger and better." The world was surely our oyster and we were eager to open it and swallow it. But as an example of how imperfectly the future can be predicted, including anything I might say today, within three years we found ourselves in the worst depression my country has ever known, and within 13 years into World War II. From the evidence since that time, I am not al all convinced that "bigger makes better."

So I decided to talk to you today about two problems to which I have been devoting attention for many years and which I think will have a priority status for you in the period ahead. There are the prevention of nuclear war and the stabilization of population growth. My interest in the second grew out of the first, since the pressure of population could trigger World War III.

As a result of my own experiences in World War II, I decided to do what I could to help prevent the next one since I concluded that there must surely be a better way to settle our conflicts. My studies brought me in contact with the cyclical historians – the Italian Vico, the German Oswald Spengler, and the British Arnold Toynbee. I know that their conclusions are not accepted by many professional historians, but they were both helpful and fascinating to me. It you are not already familiar with them, I commend them to you. Their contribution is that history should be studied as a comparison of civilizations rather than as a progression of names, dates and places. Spengler identified six civilizations – Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Classical (a combination of Greece and Rome), Arabian and Western. By listing the origins of each of these six civilizations on the same line and setting forth their major political, cultural and spiritual events chronologically in parallel columns, he identified a spring, a summer, autumn and winter for the earlier five civilizations. He believe that only Western is today alive, dynamic and creative, and by comparing Western with the other five endeavored to predict Western possibilities for its remaining life.

In the 30 years which intervened between the publications of Spengler and Toynbee, such strides were made in archaeological and anthropological discoveries that Toynbee was able to identify 29 civilizations of which he designated 12 as dead, eight in the last stages of disintegration, three abortive, five arrested, and only Western as alive, dynamic, historic and creative. In this analysis of these various civilizations, Toynbee found that those which had died did so because they were incapable of making a successful response to some overwhelming challenge which had confronted them. Of these challenges, ranging from climatic changes to land erosion, the most frequent one was incessant warfare among the leading nation states of the civilization. He states that war is the primary challenge of Western Civilization because of its heavy toll upon the intellectual and creative leadership of each nation, constituting a fraction of 1 per cent of the population, without which the rest of society cannot function. He concludes that if the West can make a successful response to this recurring challenge of war, there is no reason why it cannot go on indefinitely. If it cannot, he implies Western Civilization must eventually go the way of all its predecessors.

The major civilizations appear to have a life span of approximately 1,500 to 1,700 years. For example, the one most familiar to us – Classical – began in the Aegean Islands about 1,100 B.C. and ended with the fall of Rome in 450 A.D. If Western is considered to have begun with Charlemagne around 840 A.D., then it is some 1,100 years into its progression. The point of this is to realize that you will be living the productive years of your life not in the springtime or the summer of your civilization, but in the late fall or early winter. This early winter encompasses a period of some 200 years which Spengler called "The era of contending states and annihilating wars" and Toynbee termed "The Times of Troubles." If this period began for the West, as these historians suggest, with Napoleon in 1800, then the likelihood is that your generation and the next will have to see it through.

In trying to pinpoint the analogy more precisely with the Graeco-Roman civilization which I admit can be nothing more than a pleasant exercise or game because of the differences of conditions, I have postulated that we are somewhere between the Second and the Third Punic War – 200 to 150 B.C. The Third Punic War, which ended with the complete destruction and obliteration of Carthage in 146 B.C., removed Rome’s most serious rival and paved the way for its final domination of the Mediterranean world. A review of this sordid chapter in Roman history leads to two observations: if future wars cannot be prevented, particularly with the nuclear weapons which are now in our armaments, for goodness’ sake let’s not lose them; and second, only the victors write the history. Possibly before the year 2,000 A.D., when you and your contemporaries in the United States and Europe are in positions of command and decision-making, you may have to help determine the question – Who is going to be Rome and who is going the be Carthage in our day? Will the balance of Western Civilization continue to be run by peoples of the Atlantic democracies or by the dictatorships of the East? Before that time you will have to determine your own positions on what I regard as the basic issues: freedom versus tyranny; does the state exist for man or does man exist for the state; and freedom of religion versus worship of the state.

It comes as something of a shock to a person who flies from New York to Los Angeles and observes vast areas of open land to learn that competent observers consider the United States to be overpopulated. But the point is that people do not want to live in the mountains, in the deserts or on the abandoned farms. And to support the burgeoning populations of the great cities, a vast hinterland of open land is needed for agriculture, mining, manufacturing and recreation. Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist and ecologist, has stated that the optimum population for the United States for quality living in relation to our natural resources, and particularly water to wash away enormous industrial and human wastes, is 150,000,000 people. The May 1973 population is 210,000,000. At current growth rates we are well on our way to 230,000,000 people by 1985. Predictably, these warnings of ecologists and demographers were either ignored or ridiculed, but the first signs of the energy crisis in 1972 produced some sobering reactions, as does the realization that out of 36 important raw materials, the United States is sufficient only in 10, and must now import each year certain percentages of 26 others.

As for the underdeveloped countries, the outlook is grim. Over many years, Western science has intervened to lower the death rate. Simultaneously, it has not intervened to lower the birth rate. Massive death control – worldwide – has not been offset by massive birth control. Death control is popular, birth control is unpopular. As a result, the exponential growth of populations at 2 per cent per annum world wide is now so rapid that many demographers predict that the world’s three and one half billion humans will multiply to seven billion by the year 2,000. In my own opinion, long before such numbers are reached, the misery and chaos will be such that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, death, war, famine and plague, will combine to reduce and limit these populations to new viable numbers. How ironic such a solution would be to the promise of our vaunted science and technology!

So why not utilize our science and technology to prevent these disasters? Only during the past decade have family planning programmes gained acceptance in many of the over-populated areas of the world. But we are also learning that family planning is not the answer, because many couples do not begin to plan their families until after they have already had three or more children; by which time the damage has been done. The administrators of our AID programmes have learned that it does little good to dispense contraceptives to people who do not have the incentive or the knowledge to use them. And how does one create incentives among peoples largely illiterate and where pro-natalist customs are ingrained in the cultural heritage? The answer is tragically, we do not yet know how to stabilize populations anywhere and neither are they being stabilized anywhere.

From the standpoint of these population pressures triggering future war, I would give as my opinion that the war which began with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was a population war. In recent years, I believe a good case can be made that such pressures were also a basic cause of the conflicts between Egypt-Israel in 1967, Honduras-El Salvador in 1969, and Bangladesh in 1972. From the standpoint of diplomacy, I would think that in the next 50 years the North-South confrontation between the developed areas may rival that between East and West. In the United States, there is a growing body of informed opinion which believes that overpopulation is the fundamental cause of our unemployment, inflations, pollution, and many of our social problems.

One of the most dramatic events to aid in the growing realization and understanding of this world dilemma, was the publication in early 1972 of The Limits to Growth by a team of MIT scientists. As many of you know, this pioneering study was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a group of some 70 citizens of 25 nationalities, who share a deep concern regarding the current predicament of mankind. The human mind is a good computer, but it can ordinarily handle only one or two variables. In The Limits to Growth the MIT team was interested in the constant interaction of five variables: populations, food per capita, industrial output per capita, depletion of non-renewable resources, and pollution. They gathered known world data on these five subjects and fed them into a global computer model. In every doubtful case the most optimistic estimate was made of unknown quantities and the model was constantly biased to longer growth than would probably ever occur in the real world. Nevertheless, no matter how there variables were combined, the behavior mode of the system is clearly that of overshoot and collapse, permitting the investigators to say with confidence, "Under the assumption of no major changes in the present system, population and industrial growth will be compelled to stop within the next century, at the latest."

The study assuredly struck some raw nerve of the scientific and academic community, particularly among the Keynesian economists, for a veritable torrent of criticism arose. This has been most valuable for it has created tremendous interest, caused the book to be translated into many languages and initiated a world-wide dialogue. The criticisms have been tabulated and answered by Dr. Aurelio Peccei of the Club of Rome at the request of the Council of Europe. Numerous computer projects have been undertaken to test the findings of The Limits to Growth on a regional and national basis.

Although the sponsors of The Limits to Growth go to considerable lengths to point out that they are not attempting to predict the future and that they do no advocate immediate zero growth, I hope you will follow the conclusions and the continuing dialogue carefully – for the results are applicable not in the wild blue yonder but to your lifetimes and certainly will be to the life spans of your children.

If by now you have come to the conclusion that I am forecasting for you a pessimistic and dismal future, such is not the case. In the same sense that Socrates advised, "Know Thyself," I would say to you "Know the time into which you have been born, what is possible and what is not possible." Certainly you have not been born into the springtime of Western Civilization, when the spiritual forces were so strong that men laboured gladly for 50 years to build magnificent Gothic cathedrals and in later centuries slaughtered opposing sects by droves in wars of religious zeal. This was the time of great painting during the Renaissance - Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael; of Shakespeare; late of music – Beethoven, Mozart. A new genius may appear tomorrow to surpass them, but the odds are against it. The fall and winter are the time of science and technology, and the congregation of people into the great cities in formless mass. It is no more dismal for a civilization to grow old and fulfill its destiny than it is for a man to be born, grow to manhood and old age and die. If you understand the times into which you were born – its possibilities and its limitations – there is no reason why you cannot live as happy a life as that of any previous generation.

I would like to conclude these remarks with the suggestion that there are solutions to the two major problems of war and exponential growth. These solutions will require new ways of thinking, discipline and responsibility, and will test whether our free institutions can survive.

As to preventing future war, pose the questions: If in 1938 the United States, Canada, Britain and France had been able to form a military alliance, would Hitler have marched? The answer invariably given by political scientists, generals and politicians has been that he would not. In other words, World War II was preventable, it did not have to happen. After the event, and after spilling much blood and treasure, and in the face of another similar threat, we and others who recognized that threat finally formed the military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in 1949.

After 24 years, however, it is becoming evident that as the threat is relaxed, the cement of the Alliance is beginning to loosen. If we wish to develop the common policies in defense, foreign affairs and economics that are required for instantaneous response and credibility in a nuclear age, then it is also becoming evident that a political mechanism must be injected into the NATO structure that will make consultation automatic and permit decisions to be taken without delay. The key is how to obtain adequate and fair representation for all partners in accordance with their populations and strength. On April 23, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor called for "a new Atlantic Charter" and "a new structure of international relations," and said, "A revitalized Atlantic Partnership is indispensable for it."

Canadian statesmen made a most constructive contribution in the formation of NATO in 1949 and had much to do with the inclusion of Article 2 of the Treaty which provides the great hope for its evolution. I am sure they will again be responsive and creative in the course of the restudy of the Atlantic relationship which the President has proposed. The important point for all the NATO countries is that peace, like all desirable commodities, and which everyone says he wants, has a price. The price in this instance is sharing. Will we, as the sovereign citizens of our democracies, be willing to pay this price of peace in the days ahead? If so, World War III is preventable.

The authors of The Limits to Growth concluded that man can create a society in which he can live indefinitely on earth, but only if he imposes limits on population growth and production of material goods to achieve a carefully selected state of global "equilibrium." Population should be stabilized by equalizing the birth and death rates. As one who made numerous speeches during the 1960’s stating that exponential growth of population would not be good for business, I welcomed the conclusion of the Rockefeller Commission on Population Growth and the American Future that "We have not found any convincing argument for continued national population growth. The health of our economy does not depend on it, nor does the prosperity of business or the welfare of the average person." To halt industrial growth, investment in new non-polluting plants must not exceed the retirement of old facilities. Instead of yearning for material goods, people must learn to prefer services like education and recreation. All possible resources must be recycled, including the composting of organic garbage. Products like automobiles and TV sets must be designed to last long and be repaired easily.

The result is pictured as a sort of Utopia – not the stagnation of civilization. "A society released from struggling with the many problems imposed by growth may have more energy and ingenuity available to devote to research, education, art, music, religion, recreation, athletics." The emphasis would shift over a period of time from quantity to quality in all things. Quantity is easy; quality is difficult. What a stimulating challenge this would provide to your own and succeeding generations!

It should be apparent to all who think that exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely in a finite world of limited resources. Eventually growth will have to come to a halt. If, therefore, by bringing the birth rate down to equal the new lower death rate, your generation could achieve an orderly conscious transition to equilibrium by the year 2,000, and simultaneously achieve such political, economic, and military strengths within the framework of NATO that no power or combination of powers would dare to attack it, you will have made successful responses to the challenges of war and growth that face your times and generation. If you can thus come safely through your Time of Troubles you and your children can look forward to a Post-Industrial Society such as man never before experienced – a magnificent, new Golden Age.

With the great creative accomplishments of Western Civilization to date – in art, literature, mathematics, science, space, the dignity of man – I have always hoped that Western Civilization might end by making a small quantum jump over all its predecessors in man’s relation to man. So that when future archaeologists dig us up several thousand years from now they would write: "We discovered a people who were able to live more in harmony with each other and with nature than all those who went before." I leave with you this challenging and noble prospect.

"When I graduated from UNB I had no idea that I was taking away anything more than my undergraduate degree. I have since realized that my four years at UNB provided much more than that. Yes, I got a great education, but I also made wonderful friendships, which endure even today. Both of these things helped shape my life and have brought me back to UNB as an active volunteer. I have found it to be a very enriching experience." - Kathryn McCain

Your Honour, Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Governors, Mr. President, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, and graduates. The first time I was on UNB's campus I was two weeks old. I'd like to say I immediately knew this was going to be the school for my undergraduate degree - but I honestly don't remember what was going through my head at that time. Seventeen years later, when I was applying for schools, I made the decision to come here.

We all remember that first day, being a little (or very) lost. For me, it was Head Hall and the science buildings and figuring out how they are somehow all linked. Many of us remember looking around, wondering how we were ever going to survive the next four (or five, or six) years of our degree.

As an engineering student, I set up a tactic. I introduced myself instantly to as many female engineering students as I could. This worked well, but I shouldn't have worried-UNB became a home to all of us. The atmosphere here is exceptionally warm and we've all met more people than we ever thought possible. I know that the friends that I've made here are going to last a lifetime. The UNB community has helped me grow into the person I am today. The relationships that we've built through this school's unique environment have supported us throughout our time here. We all have a classmate, teammate, roommate or professor who has helped us through a course or a tough time. In the UNB community it is easy to get involved, no matter what your passion, as there are so many opportunities available and I am truly thankful for this. We have all had our lives influenced by this community and, whether or not you realize it, everyone present here today has had a significant impact on life at UNB. I know each graduate today has had parents, grandparents, or other family and friends that have formed a support system to help them obtain their degree. I would personally like to thank my parents, Dan and Michele, for all of their support throughout the years. Thank you for the sacrifices you've made and for the words of encouragement and advice that you've offered.

Every step in this journey, we have learned many lessons, in and out of the classroom. We've learned to approach problems with a critical mind, how to take derivatives and how to use excel spreadsheets, really well. We've had hands on experience, whether we were playing with computers, robots or dirt in labs or going on simulating field trips. We can now resolve difficult problems in teams no matter what the group dynamics, a skill that you can carry forward regardless where life takes you. We've learned how to juggle the academics with the extracurriculars, and multiple part-time jobs. And we've hopefully learned to budget the money from those part-time jobs.
I am proud to be a part of UNB and proud to be here with all of you today. I value all of the lessons I have learned during my time here and I sincerely hope that you, my fellow graduates, have gained as much from your time here as I have.

The next phase of our lives offers us many opportunities. You might be starting a career, continuing your education, volunteering or travelling the world. We're all going to have to start paying back our loans, and hopefully give back to the community. No matter what we decide to do, or where we decide to go, we will remember our friends and our time here at UNB.

This year, UNB celebrated its 225th Anniversary. Meeting the alumni that were on campus this past fall for homecoming made it clear that UNB will always be a part of us. Alumni travelled back here from all over the world be part of the festivities, celebrate their accomplishments and reminisce about their experiences at UNB with their former classmates.

In 25 years, the oldest English Language University in Canada will be celebrating another big anniversary. Hopefully, we will join these alumni and return from all over the world to share stories, reflect and celebrate 250 years of UNB.

UNB has more than 64,000 living Alumni living all around the world. They include Allison McCain, an engineering graduate, CEO of McCain's Foods; Warren MacKenzie, a CS Graduate, and CEO of Redmond Group; David Ganong, CEO Ganong's Chocolates; and Frank McKenna, former Premier of NB and former Canadian Ambassador to the U.S..

Every one of these successful alumni demonstrates two important points. First, as graduates of UNB, we have the potential to go anywhere and do anything we set our minds to do. Second, and maybe more importantly, alumni before us have shown us the importance of giving back to our communities—as volunteers and through generous philanthropy. As students, we have benefited from their generosity to UNB. As UNB alumni, I hope generations after us will benefit from our contributions. Each of us has our own story of how we got to UNB. And we have all had different experiences here. But one thing we have in common is that we are now all UNB Alumni, and no matter where we go, we'll find other alumni, and continue to be proudly UNB.

Thank you for the honour of making me your valedictorian, congratulations on completing your degree and best wishes to all of my fellow graduates in the future.

If it was not irreverent he felt like saying with Simeon of old "I am ready to depart in peace," and he knew that the ladies and gentlemen before him would fully accord in that sentiment. He was not prepared, however, after coming from Ottawa to speak upon this occasion to depart without addressing a few remarks to the distinguished assemblage. He at that time had very deep feelings surging through his heart, as they must be through the hearts of all the old graduates of the University of New Brunswick. Not one who ahs passed through those classic halls could sit upon the platform tonight and think of his Alma Mater without being stirred in the depths of his being. Memory flashes the light backwards tonight, and draws aside the curtains and permits a look at that time thirty-five years ago when he and others stood before the Chancellor to receive their degree, and on this occasion we go back and dream again the old dreams, and see again the enchanted visions of roseate youth; and coming here tonight, those old graduates, with faces furrowed with lines of care and with lives wind swept by the tempests of the world, quaff anew some of those draughts from the springs of bye gone days, which cluster at the foot of the hills of eternal youth, and the hearts of all grow warm. Comrades of the class of ’65 where are you now? Not many are here. Some have gone to those green slopes which we call the city of the dead, and will come back no more; others are scattered all over this broad land and are winning distinction for themselves and brining honor to their Alma Mater; and never one but often turns back and thanks the kind fate which left his steps to this old college. And what great changes since then. Why, some of the old fellows would scarcely recognize the place or the classes. Like a spark to the powder magazine would have been in those days to some of those, old professors the sight of a petticoat in the class room. He believed that the admission of women to the college was a beneficial change. Another changed noted was in the course of study, which had been greatly broadened during the past quarter century. This, too, he believed was a change for the better.

He and all members of the Alumni would never cease to be thankful for the training they received at the their Alma Mater. What they got out of this college that stands by them was not what they carried out in their laps when they went forth from these halls after being capped by the Chancellor. That store has long since been used up and devoured. What remains is mental and intellectual muscle which is far greater than stores of book lore. The true object of this University is not to teach technicalities but to make and develop and mould true and perfect men and women. While these young men now care for and strive for the marks and class distinction (and the ambition is a laudable one) later on they will be neglectful of these things, but will be glad to note how their mental powers are growing and getting breadth and strength and are being made firm and strong, and how their whole mental vision is being broadened and widened, and how they are acquiring the mental powers and capacities to grasp and retain these great truths which are general in their application. The aim of the training at this college is not, or should not be, to fit a young man to use any single tool, but to prepare him to make the best use of all tools which he many have the opportunity of grasping when he going out into the world.

Every graduate should be true to his Alma Mater. In proportion as the graduates of the U.N.B. take a deep and intelligent interest in her welfare so shall she march on successfully or otherwise. He did not know how many Sir Donald Smiths there might be in the class which had just received their degrees, but he did know that if any became in even a small part as successful in life s was the great man that they should remember in proportion their Alma Mater even as Lord Strathacona had lavished his gifts upon the educational institutions of Montreal. All the graduates of the U.N.B. are under obligation to their Alma Mater for the rest of their lives; and all over this Canada of ours, and all over the broad world, are alumni who cherish the old College and whose sympathy and practical help for their Alma Mater will flow in a constant and increasing stream.

Mr. Foster then in most eloquent terms pictured the advancement along all lines made during the past one hundred years, and pictured in classical language the grand opportunities of the opening days of the 20th century,. He declared that development in College and University work had not kept pace with the advancement in other directions, and said the U.N.B. does not stand where it should today. New Brunswick cannot afford to let the old college go down. The University needs better equipment and larger classes. Education does much for a man or a woman, but it fails unless it makes them good citizens.

The great development of Canada during the past century was reviewed in that glowing language of which Mr. Foster is a master, and the epoch marking events and years touched upon. The opinion of the 20th century affords greater opportunities for success in life and also demands greater things from the young men and women than at any previous period. The imperialistic spirit, which is the dominant spirit of the British Empire and the Anglo Saxon race, was referred to, and Mr. foster closed his address with a most eloquent and brilliant peroration.

Your Honor, Mr. President and Members of the Senate, Mr. Chancellor and Members of the Faculty, Ladies and Gentlemen.

At last the long expected hour has arrived and we who have seen three successive classes depart from their Alma Mater are now about to follow in their footsteps. There must always be a great deal of satisfaction to the members of any class to gain the prize for which they have worked so long; but the flight of time and the influence of custom have given to the year 1900 a certain charm which makes it a peculiarly favorable year to graduate from this college. One hundred years ago the 12th of February last "a college called the College of New Brunswick was founded and incorporated by a Provincial charter under the great Seal of the Province"—this was the beginning of the University of New Brunswick.

It is a custom of our race to commemorate at certain periods the important events either in a nation's history or of any institution connected with that nation. The Senate, Alumni, Faculty, and Students have therefore joined together to commemorate the founding of this noble seat of learning and we have no doubt that before this week is ended all will have come to the conclusion that their labours were not in vain. For these reasons we feel highly honored in being fortunate enough to have the great privilege of graduating this year.

Yet there must ever be a certain amount of sadness connected with occasions such as this. Here we met as strangers in the fall of 1896 and now after having been together in class-room and on campus for nearly four years we are about to part perhaps never to meet again. They have been pleasant years and the meeting together in our college societies and at the several functions that mark the different stages of our college course, the friendly "scraps" and midnight revels will always be remembered by us as among the most pleasant experiences of our lives. But these things must be left behind; soon we shall pass from the protecting care of our Alma Mater to cope with the stern realities of life.

As the representative of my class, custom bids me to recall briefly the most important events of our class history. We can hardly realize that nearly four years have passed away since twenty-one young men and one young woman entered these classic halls and enrolled themselves on the University annals as the class of 1900. The history of our class does not differ to any great extent, in the first three years from that of the other classes. A marked feature of each class has been the great decrease in numbers which it undergoes from the time of entrance to that of graduation, and ours is no exception. The twenty-two Freshmen dwindled down to fourteen at the beginning of the Sophomore year, but the addition of five senior matriculants increased our number to nineteen. This number diminished to thirteen in the Junior year, and now we graduate with twelve. Of this number only eight belong to the original twenty-two.

As Freshmen we were frequently called upon to defend ourselves from, as we then thought, the over zealous Sophomores and this we did right manfully—numbers giving us strength. As Sophomores we suddenly changed our minds in regard to the privileges of Freshmen, and often considered it our duty to uphold the prestige of our class. The Junior year passed away swiftly and uneventfully. We began to take a deeper and more lasting interest in Alma Mater.

The beginning of our Senior year was marked by a wide difference of opinion, concerning the carrying out of some of our customs. The breach grew wider and wider, and finally an event occurred which is familiar to everyone. For a number of years a form of initiation for Freshmen, and a code of unwritten laws had been in vogue. Of late years an agitation had arisen against these customs, and quite a strong body of the students, but yet in the minority, had been formed for the purpose of doing away with them. This year the opposition was so strong that the programme of initiation was not carried out; but about a week after the college year opened a number of Freshmen were seized while on their way to a reception, carried to the gymnasium and there the collar, tie, and the right boot of each one were removed. This was found out by the faculty, and five Seniors were virtually expelled, and nine Sophomores and one Junior rusticated for two months.

The most regrettable feature of the whole affair was the stand taken by some of the students opposed to these customs. The expelled students having apologized, and having promised for the future to refrain from taking part in any form of initiation, requested to be allowed to return; but the opponents of initiation instead of using their influence to get them back, did all in their power to keep them out, even going so far as to threaten to leave if the faculty under any condition would allow them to come back.

However opinions may differ concerning the stand taken by the faculty, it can be said in their favor that it was their duty to uphold the discipline of the college. Yet, nothing can be said in favor of one student trying to bring about the expulsion of another, especially a class mate; even if he is not in accordance with the actions of a fellow student, and so feels that he cannot help him when he has got into trouble, he should at least refrain from
interfering in any way, and allow the faculty to deal with the matter in the way they think best.

In spite of these disturbances, it affords us very much pleasure to state that the different societies under the control of the student body, have been quite up to the standard of other years. Each one, although perhaps differing in some personal matters, entered into
the work with a determination to make the societies a success and to do all in their power for the general good of the college.

Our Debating Society has completed another very successful year. The debates have been of a high order, and marked progress has been made in the debating ability of the student body. Yet it is to be regretted that not more than half of the students avail themselves of the privileges of the most important of the college societies. The other half are making a great mistake. They are losing the benefits of a training that cannot be obtained under other conditions, a training that is necessary for full success in any calling for which they are preparing themselves. We believe that a college course does not consist entirely of a constant grinding over books. Much can be gained by regular meeting together for the exchanging of ideas in debate, and by the fraternal spirit that is thus engendered. This meeting together wears off the rough corners of a man, and he goes out in the world better prepared to understand human nature, and so to make a success of his life work.

The University Monthly still continues to be the organ of the student body. We believe that it has in no way fallen below the standard set for it by previous classes. True it has not appeared regularly on the twentieth of each month but this is through no fault of the editors. Students should be always ready to contribute an article when asked by the editor, and thus lessen the by no means easy task of "getting out the Monthly." The staff of editors considering that this was the centennial year of the college, decided to get out a Centennial Number. It made its appearance in March and contains cuts of the several Chancellors who have presided over this University, as well as many interesting facts concerning its history. The new design for the cover obtained especially for this number presents a very neat appearance and it has been decided to use it for the future issues.

All matters pertaining to athletics are regulated by the University Athletic Association. The college never had better material from which to form a football team than last fall; but on account of the disturbances of that time it was impossible to organize. Yet the manly game was not entirely wanting. Teams were formed from the Freshmen and Sophomore classes, and some excellent practice games were played, also good match games between the Freshmen team and the teams from the Normal and High Schools.

Feeling the want of winter sport an open air rink was started on the athletic field. We were successful in obtaining a beautiful sheet of ice; but the elements were against us. As soon as we got it cleared off a storm would come—this was continued all through the months of January and February. If we didn't get the skating we demonstrated the fact that an open air rink can be run by the college providing the weather is favorable. It is to be hoped that the other classes will not be discouraged by the partial failure this year. We are sure that it can be run successfully unless for an exceptionally stormy winter. It has been the custom for a number of years to hold the sports on the Queen's Birthday. They have been postponed this year until the afternoon of Wednesday next—students' day of the celebration. A large number of the students are now in training and everything points to successful sports on that occasion.

Nor is the aesthetic side of college life neglected. The Glee Club still flourishes under the guidance of Prof. Stockley, and is very popular among the musical portion of the student body. Here a pleasant hour is spent singing those inspiring songs peculiar to college men.

Many changes have been made in the course of study. At first an optional course was open only to the members of the Senior Class. For the first time this year the Juniors were also allowed a number of options. Formerly those who took graduation honors in any subject were not required to make more than a pass in the ordinary work of the subject in which they were taking honors. This year the regulation, that every one must make first division in the ordinary work as well as in the honor work, took effect. Thus the class of 1900 is the first to graduate under this regulation.

Last Encaenia Prof. Downing retired from the chair of Physics and Electrical Engineering, which he had ably filled for a number of years. TheUniversity has been fortunate in obtaining a man by no means inferior to his predecessor. Dr. Scott has discharged the duties of his chair faithfully and with marked ability. He is an enthusiastic teacher and he will be of great service not only to the University, but also to the cause of education generally in our province.

At the beginning of this academical year a number of changes were made in the arrangement of the course of study. Under the former arrangement Dr. Bailey had Chemistry, Botany, Zoology and Geology. This made a large amount of work for him and for want of time he could not do ample justice to them all. By the new arrangement Chemistry and Botany are interchanged—Botany coming in the first year and Chemistry in the third. Prof. Dixon is now lecturer in Chemistry, and Dr. Scott has taken some of
the work previously done by the former.

A much needed change was also made in the method of obtaining water for the Chemical and Physical Laboratories. Formerly all the water used for experimental work had to be carried up-stairs and placed in buckets. Early this year through the efforts of Prof. Dixon, pipes were laid, and water is now carried to the different rooms in which it is needed in a much more modern way. The Chemical laboratory has also been rearranged. All the old material that has been collecting there for years was removed, and the room now presents quite a creditable appearance.

The advantages of the library have been greatly appreciated by the student body, as is shown by the large number of books that have been taken out this year. In our Junior year it was arranged that no lectures should be held in the Library. Any student that has a spare hour during time of lectures, can now if he wishes retire to the Library and spend a quiet hour in reading and meditation. But the students should remember that it is not a place for carrying on extended conversations with one another. Indeed the rules of the Library forbid talking altogether in the room, and those who do not wish to read should remember that there are others who do, and try to find some other place to amuse themselves. New books are being continually added to the Library and Dr. Davidson, as librarian, is always ready and willing to aid any student to find a book, or to inform him in what books he will find the information he is seeking. During last vacation the books were catalogued by the librarian, by the card system. The cards with the names of the books printed on them are arranged alphabetically in a neat case. This makes a convenient and ready mode of reference, besides having the advantage that as now books are received, cards can easily be added, thus keeping the list up to date.

The department of Civil Engineering has received a great impetus of late years. There are now sixteen students taking that course. At the beginning of our Junior year, chiefly through the efforts of our class, an agitation was started to obtain funds for erecting an
Engineering Building. Committees were selected to go around and solicit subscriptions and the result has been very satisfactory indeed—over six thousand dollars having been already raised by subscription. Through the efforts of His Honor Mr. Justice Barker a bill was passed through the Legislature granting to the University about eleven thousand dollars of the Madras Fund. This was given to the Building Fund. As a result the corner stone of the new building is to be laid during the coming celebration.

Some time ago we met to consider what we could do for our Alma Mater. We decided to contribute five hundred dollars towards the Building Fund to be paid within five years after graduation. It was left to each one to decide how he should pay his share; whether as a lump sum at the end of the five years or by yearly payments during that time.

In our Sophomore year a threat of withdrawing the Provincial grant imperilled the very existence of our University. This had the effect of directing towards us a certain amount of criticism. This criticism seems to have been of great benefit, for every year since that time the numbers entered on the college records have continually increased. The beginning of this year saw the largest number of Matriculants in the history of the college. Thirty-three were enrolled as members of the class of 1903, and twelve Senior Matriculants were added to the class of 1902. The prospects are bright for a still larger number next year, and we have no doubt that our Alma Mater will enter into the first year of the twentieth century with renewed strength and vigor, to continue for another hundred years the work she has been doing in the past.

Since the University of New Brunswick is the cap-stone of the educational system of the Province, we believe that it should be in closer touch with the Common and High Schools. True greater advantages are offered in this University for those who are teachers, or expect to be teachers, than in any other of the colleges of the Maritime Provinces, which is shown by the fart that among the present enrolled students there are about twenty licensed teachers. Yet something should be done to obtain a higher and more uniform standard for matriculation. A young man makes the mistake of his life by entering college without being fully prepared expecting to make up for what he lacks after he has entered. He will find that "the making up process" will stick to him all through his course, and the chances are that after he has finished his first or at most second year, even if he has managed to avoid the fatal number of "plucks," he will become discouraged and not return to finish his course.

We believe that if the members of the faculty would frequently visit the schools at the centres of population, and take a more active interest in matters pertaining to education generally in the province, it would be of great advantage to the "University. This is an age of competition, and it is only by the combined efforts of all those connected with the college in any way that we may hope to get our share of the young men and women who are intending to take a college course.

Before closing it seems fitting to refer to the war which is at present engaging the attention of the Great Empire of which we form a part. We have all been thrilled by the wave of loyalty to the Motherland that has of late passed over this country—a loyalty
that has led nearly three thousand of our brave sons to leave our shores and go to a country thousands of miles away to do battle for the rights and privileges that are dear to the heart of every British citizen. As soldiers, some of them having already dyed the South African veldt with their life-blood, they have upheld the traditions of their race, and brought fame and honor to their native land. We are proud of such men and we consider ourselves highly honored to count among them some that have attended this University.

To you Mr. Chancellor and Gentlemen of the Faculty, we wish to return thanks for the interest you have always taken in our welfare. You have always been ready and willing to aid us by your experience and advice; and it is only now, when we are about to part, that we fully realize how much we owe to you who have been our instructors and guides throughout the past four years of our lives. We appreciate the efforts you have put forward on our behalf, and we earnestly hope that each and every one of you shall long be spared to continue in the good work of your chosen profession.

To the people of Fredericton we wish to express our gratitude for the many kindnesses shown us during our stay among you. We have always found you willing to assist us to bring to a successful issue the different undertakings peculiar to student life. In after years wherever our lot is cast or in whatever sphere of action we shall be destined to labour, we shall always carry with us pleasant memories of our somewhat prolonged stay in your beautiful city.

Fellow Students, the time has come when we must say farewell to you. The space of time spent together in these halls has been one of pleasure, and, we trust, of profit to all of us. Let the best interest of the college be the uppermost thoughts of your mind; remembering always that the making of high marks should not be the only ambition of a college course. We are aware that we have left the different interests of the college in good hands, and we can assure you that, although widely separated, we shall follow the careers of each one of you, both as undergraduates and graduates with unabating interest.

Time and again during our undergraduate course we have looked forward to this occasion as being one of the happiest of our lives, but now, when the time has come to take our departure a feeling of sadness comes over us, but we must bow to the inevitable. The class of 1900 bids farewell to these historic halls and steps-out into the "wide, wide world."

If it was not irreverent he felt like saying with Simeon of old "I am ready to depart in peace," and he knew that the ladies and gentlemen before him would fully accord in that sentiment. He was not prepared, however, after coming from Ottawa to speak upon this occasion to depart without addressing a few remarks to the distinguished assemblage. He at that time had very deep feelings surging through his heart, as they must be through the hearts of all the old graduates of the University of New Brunswick. Not one who ahs passed through those classic halls could sit upon the platform tonight and think of his Alma Mater without being stirred in the depths of his being. Memory flashes the light backwards tonight, and draws aside the curtains and permits a look at that time thirty-five years ago when he and others stood before the Chancellor to receive their degree, and on this occasion we go back and dream again the old dreams, and see again the enchanted visions of roseate youth; and coming here tonight, those old graduates, with faces furrowed with lines of care and with lives wind swept by the tempests of the world, quaff anew some of those draughts from the springs of bye gone days, which cluster at the foot of the hills of eternal youth, and the hearts of all grow warm. Comrades of the class of ’65 where are you now? Not many are here. Some have gone to those green slopes which we call the city of the dead, and will come back no more; others are scattered all over this broad land and are winning distinction for themselves and brining honor to their Alma Mater; and never one but often turns back and thanks the kind fate which left his steps to this old college. And what great changes since then. Why, some of the old fellows would scarcely recognize the place or the classes. Like a spark to the powder magazine would have been in those days to some of those, old professors the sight of a petticoat in the class room. He believed that the admission of women to the college was a beneficial change. Another changed noted was in the course of study, which had been greatly broadened during the past quarter century. This, too, he believed was a change for the better.

He and all members of the Alumni would never cease to be thankful for the training they received at the their Alma Mater. What they got out of this college that stands by them was not what they carried out in their laps when they went forth from these halls after being capped by the Chancellor. That store has long since been used up and devoured. What remains is mental and intellectual muscle which is far greater than stores of book lore. The true object of this University is not to teach technicalities but to make and develop and mould true and perfect men and women. While these young men now care for and strive for the marks and class distinction (and the ambition is a laudable one) later on they will be neglectful of these things, but will be glad to note how their mental powers are growing and getting breadth and strength and are being made firm and strong, and how their whole mental vision is being broadened and widened, and how they are acquiring the mental powers and capacities to grasp and retain these great truths which are general in their application. The aim of the training at this college is not, or should not be, to fit a young man to use any single tool, but to prepare him to make the best use of all tools which he many have the opportunity of grasping when he going out into the world.

Every graduate should be true to his Alma Mater. In proportion as the graduates of the U.N.B. take a deep and intelligent interest in her welfare so shall she march on successfully or otherwise. He did not know how many Sir Donald Smiths there might be in the class which had just received their degrees, but he did know that if any became in even a small part as successful in life s was the great man that they should remember in proportion their Alma Mater even as Lord Strathacona had lavished his gifts upon the educational institutions of Montreal. All the graduates of the U.N.B. are under obligation to their Alma Mater for the rest of their lives; and all over this Canada of ours, and all over the broad world, are alumni who cherish the old College and whose sympathy and practical help for their Alma Mater will flow in a constant and increasing stream.

Mr. Foster then in most eloquent terms pictured the advancement along all lines made during the past one hundred years, and pictured in classical language the grand opportunities of the opening days of the 20th century,. He declared that development in College and University work had not kept pace with the advancement in other directions, and said the U.N.B. does not stand where it should today. New Brunswick cannot afford to let the old college go down. The University needs better equipment and larger classes. Education does much for a man or a woman, but it fails unless it makes them good citizens.

The great development of Canada during the past century was reviewed in that glowing language of which Mr. Foster is a master, and the epoch marking events and years touched upon. The opinion of the 20th century affords greater opportunities for success in life and also demands greater things from the young men and women than at any previous period. The imperialistic spirit, which is the dominant spirit of the British Empire and the Anglo Saxon race, was referred to, and Mr. foster closed his address with a most eloquent and brilliant peroration.

Your Honor, Mr. President and Members of the Senate, Mr. Chancellor and Members of the Faculty, Ladies and Gentlemen.

At last the long expected hour has arrived and we who have seen three successive classes depart from their Alma Mater are now about to follow in their footsteps. There must always be a great deal of satisfaction to the members of any class to gain the prize for which they have worked so long; but the flight of time and the influence of custom have given to the year 1900 a certain charm which makes it a peculiarly favorable year to graduate from this college. One hundred years ago the 12th of February last "a college called the College of New Brunswick was founded and incorporated by a Provincial charter under the great Seal of the Province"—this was the beginning of the University of New Brunswick.

It is a custom of our race to commemorate at certain periods the important events either in a nation's history or of any institution connected with that nation. The Senate, Alumni, Faculty, and Students have therefore joined together to commemorate the founding of this noble seat of learning and we have no doubt that before this week is ended all will have come to the conclusion that their labours were not in vain. For these reasons we feel highly honored in being fortunate enough to have the great privilege of graduating this year.

Yet there must ever be a certain amount of sadness connected with occasions such as this. Here we met as strangers in the fall of 1896 and now after having been together in class-room and on campus for nearly four years we are about to part perhaps never to meet again. They have been pleasant years and the meeting together in our college societies and at the several functions that mark the different stages of our college course, the friendly "scraps" and midnight revels will always be remembered by us as among the most pleasant experiences of our lives. But these things must be left behind; soon we shall pass from the protecting care of our Alma Mater to cope with the stern realities of life.

As the representative of my class, custom bids me to recall briefly the most important events of our class history. We can hardly realize that nearly four years have passed away since twenty-one young men and one young woman entered these classic halls and enrolled themselves on the University annals as the class of 1900. The history of our class does not differ to any great extent, in the first three years from that of the other classes. A marked feature of each class has been the great decrease in numbers which it undergoes from the time of entrance to that of graduation, and ours is no exception. The twenty-two Freshmen dwindled down to fourteen at the beginning of the Sophomore year, but the addition of five senior matriculants increased our number to nineteen. This number diminished to thirteen in the Junior year, and now we graduate with twelve. Of this number only eight belong to the original twenty-two.

As Freshmen we were frequently called upon to defend ourselves from, as we then thought, the over zealous Sophomores and this we did right manfully—numbers giving us strength. As Sophomores we suddenly changed our minds in regard to the privileges of Freshmen, and often considered it our duty to uphold the prestige of our class. The Junior year passed away swiftly and uneventfully. We began to take a deeper and more lasting interest in Alma Mater.

The beginning of our Senior year was marked by a wide difference of opinion, concerning the carrying out of some of our customs. The breach grew wider and wider, and finally an event occurred which is familiar to everyone. For a number of years a form of initiation for Freshmen, and a code of unwritten laws had been in vogue. Of late years an agitation had arisen against these customs, and quite a strong body of the students, but yet in the minority, had been formed for the purpose of doing away with them. This year the opposition was so strong that the programme of initiation was not carried out; but about a week after the college year opened a number of Freshmen were seized while on their way to a reception, carried to the gymnasium and there the collar, tie, and the right boot of each one were removed. This was found out by the faculty, and five Seniors were virtually expelled, and nine Sophomores and one Junior rusticated for two months.

The most regrettable feature of the whole affair was the stand taken by some of the students opposed to these customs. The expelled students having apologized, and having promised for the future to refrain from taking part in any form of initiation, requested to be allowed to return; but the opponents of initiation instead of using their influence to get them back, did all in their power to keep them out, even going so far as to threaten to leave if the faculty under any condition would allow them to come back.

However opinions may differ concerning the stand taken by the faculty, it can be said in their favor that it was their duty to uphold the discipline of the college. Yet, nothing can be said in favor of one student trying to bring about the expulsion of another, especially a class mate; even if he is not in accordance with the actions of a fellow student, and so feels that he cannot help him when he has got into trouble, he should at least refrain from
interfering in any way, and allow the faculty to deal with the matter in the way they think best.

In spite of these disturbances, it affords us very much pleasure to state that the different societies under the control of the student body, have been quite up to the standard of other years. Each one, although perhaps differing in some personal matters, entered into
the work with a determination to make the societies a success and to do all in their power for the general good of the college.

Our Debating Society has completed another very successful year. The debates have been of a high order, and marked progress has been made in the debating ability of the student body. Yet it is to be regretted that not more than half of the students avail themselves of the privileges of the most important of the college societies. The other half are making a great mistake. They are losing the benefits of a training that cannot be obtained under other conditions, a training that is necessary for full success in any calling for which they are preparing themselves. We believe that a college course does not consist entirely of a constant grinding over books. Much can be gained by regular meeting together for the exchanging of ideas in debate, and by the fraternal spirit that is thus engendered. This meeting together wears off the rough corners of a man, and he goes out in the world better prepared to understand human nature, and so to make a success of his life work.

The University Monthly still continues to be the organ of the student body. We believe that it has in no way fallen below the standard set for it by previous classes. True it has not appeared regularly on the twentieth of each month but this is through no fault of the editors. Students should be always ready to contribute an article when asked by the editor, and thus lessen the by no means easy task of "getting out the Monthly." The staff of editors considering that this was the centennial year of the college, decided to get out a Centennial Number. It made its appearance in March and contains cuts of the several Chancellors who have presided over this University, as well as many interesting facts concerning its history. The new design for the cover obtained especially for this number presents a very neat appearance and it has been decided to use it for the future issues.

All matters pertaining to athletics are regulated by the University Athletic Association. The college never had better material from which to form a football team than last fall; but on account of the disturbances of that time it was impossible to organize. Yet the manly game was not entirely wanting. Teams were formed from the Freshmen and Sophomore classes, and some excellent practice games were played, also good match games between the Freshmen team and the teams from the Normal and High Schools.

Feeling the want of winter sport an open air rink was started on the athletic field. We were successful in obtaining a beautiful sheet of ice; but the elements were against us. As soon as we got it cleared off a storm would come—this was continued all through the months of January and February. If we didn't get the skating we demonstrated the fact that an open air rink can be run by the college providing the weather is favorable. It is to be hoped that the other classes will not be discouraged by the partial failure this year. We are sure that it can be run successfully unless for an exceptionally stormy winter. It has been the custom for a number of years to hold the sports on the Queen's Birthday. They have been postponed this year until the afternoon of Wednesday next—students' day of the celebration. A large number of the students are now in training and everything points to successful sports on that occasion.

Nor is the aesthetic side of college life neglected. The Glee Club still flourishes under the guidance of Prof. Stockley, and is very popular among the musical portion of the student body. Here a pleasant hour is spent singing those inspiring songs peculiar to college men.

Many changes have been made in the course of study. At first an optional course was open only to the members of the Senior Class. For the first time this year the Juniors were also allowed a number of options. Formerly those who took graduation honors in any subject were not required to make more than a pass in the ordinary work of the subject in which they were taking honors. This year the regulation, that every one must make first division in the ordinary work as well as in the honor work, took effect. Thus the class of 1900 is the first to graduate under this regulation.

Last Encaenia Prof. Downing retired from the chair of Physics and Electrical Engineering, which he had ably filled for a number of years. TheUniversity has been fortunate in obtaining a man by no means inferior to his predecessor. Dr. Scott has discharged the duties of his chair faithfully and with marked ability. He is an enthusiastic teacher and he will be of great service not only to the University, but also to the cause of education generally in our province.

At the beginning of this academical year a number of changes were made in the arrangement of the course of study. Under the former arrangement Dr. Bailey had Chemistry, Botany, Zoology and Geology. This made a large amount of work for him and for want of time he could not do ample justice to them all. By the new arrangement Chemistry and Botany are interchanged—Botany coming in the first year and Chemistry in the third. Prof. Dixon is now lecturer in Chemistry, and Dr. Scott has taken some of
the work previously done by the former.

A much needed change was also made in the method of obtaining water for the Chemical and Physical Laboratories. Formerly all the water used for experimental work had to be carried up-stairs and placed in buckets. Early this year through the efforts of Prof. Dixon, pipes were laid, and water is now carried to the different rooms in which it is needed in a much more modern way. The Chemical laboratory has also been rearranged. All the old material that has been collecting there for years was removed, and the room now presents quite a creditable appearance.

The advantages of the library have been greatly appreciated by the student body, as is shown by the large number of books that have been taken out this year. In our Junior year it was arranged that no lectures should be held in the Library. Any student that has a spare hour during time of lectures, can now if he wishes retire to the Library and spend a quiet hour in reading and meditation. But the students should remember that it is not a place for carrying on extended conversations with one another. Indeed the rules of the Library forbid talking altogether in the room, and those who do not wish to read should remember that there are others who do, and try to find some other place to amuse themselves. New books are being continually added to the Library and Dr. Davidson, as librarian, is always ready and willing to aid any student to find a book, or to inform him in what books he will find the information he is seeking. During last vacation the books were catalogued by the librarian, by the card system. The cards with the names of the books printed on them are arranged alphabetically in a neat case. This makes a convenient and ready mode of reference, besides having the advantage that as now books are received, cards can easily be added, thus keeping the list up to date.

The department of Civil Engineering has received a great impetus of late years. There are now sixteen students taking that course. At the beginning of our Junior year, chiefly through the efforts of our class, an agitation was started to obtain funds for erecting an
Engineering Building. Committees were selected to go around and solicit subscriptions and the result has been very satisfactory indeed—over six thousand dollars having been already raised by subscription. Through the efforts of His Honor Mr. Justice Barker a bill was passed through the Legislature granting to the University about eleven thousand dollars of the Madras Fund. This was given to the Building Fund. As a result the corner stone of the new building is to be laid during the coming celebration.

Some time ago we met to consider what we could do for our Alma Mater. We decided to contribute five hundred dollars towards the Building Fund to be paid within five years after graduation. It was left to each one to decide how he should pay his share; whether as a lump sum at the end of the five years or by yearly payments during that time.

In our Sophomore year a threat of withdrawing the Provincial grant imperilled the very existence of our University. This had the effect of directing towards us a certain amount of criticism. This criticism seems to have been of great benefit, for every year since that time the numbers entered on the college records have continually increased. The beginning of this year saw the largest number of Matriculants in the history of the college. Thirty-three were enrolled as members of the class of 1903, and twelve Senior Matriculants were added to the class of 1902. The prospects are bright for a still larger number next year, and we have no doubt that our Alma Mater will enter into the first year of the twentieth century with renewed strength and vigor, to continue for another hundred years the work she has been doing in the past.

Since the University of New Brunswick is the cap-stone of the educational system of the Province, we believe that it should be in closer touch with the Common and High Schools. True greater advantages are offered in this University for those who are teachers, or expect to be teachers, than in any other of the colleges of the Maritime Provinces, which is shown by the fart that among the present enrolled students there are about twenty licensed teachers. Yet something should be done to obtain a higher and more uniform standard for matriculation. A young man makes the mistake of his life by entering college without being fully prepared expecting to make up for what he lacks after he has entered. He will find that "the making up process" will stick to him all through his course, and the chances are that after he has finished his first or at most second year, even if he has managed to avoid the fatal number of "plucks," he will become discouraged and not return to finish his course.

We believe that if the members of the faculty would frequently visit the schools at the centres of population, and take a more active interest in matters pertaining to education generally in the province, it would be of great advantage to the "University. This is an age of competition, and it is only by the combined efforts of all those connected with the college in any way that we may hope to get our share of the young men and women who are intending to take a college course.

Before closing it seems fitting to refer to the war which is at present engaging the attention of the Great Empire of which we form a part. We have all been thrilled by the wave of loyalty to the Motherland that has of late passed over this country—a loyalty
that has led nearly three thousand of our brave sons to leave our shores and go to a country thousands of miles away to do battle for the rights and privileges that are dear to the heart of every British citizen. As soldiers, some of them having already dyed the South African veldt with their life-blood, they have upheld the traditions of their race, and brought fame and honor to their native land. We are proud of such men and we consider ourselves highly honored to count among them some that have attended this University.

To you Mr. Chancellor and Gentlemen of the Faculty, we wish to return thanks for the interest you have always taken in our welfare. You have always been ready and willing to aid us by your experience and advice; and it is only now, when we are about to part, that we fully realize how much we owe to you who have been our instructors and guides throughout the past four years of our lives. We appreciate the efforts you have put forward on our behalf, and we earnestly hope that each and every one of you shall long be spared to continue in the good work of your chosen profession.

To the people of Fredericton we wish to express our gratitude for the many kindnesses shown us during our stay among you. We have always found you willing to assist us to bring to a successful issue the different undertakings peculiar to student life. In after years wherever our lot is cast or in whatever sphere of action we shall be destined to labour, we shall always carry with us pleasant memories of our somewhat prolonged stay in your beautiful city.

Fellow Students, the time has come when we must say farewell to you. The space of time spent together in these halls has been one of pleasure, and, we trust, of profit to all of us. Let the best interest of the college be the uppermost thoughts of your mind; remembering always that the making of high marks should not be the only ambition of a college course. We are aware that we have left the different interests of the college in good hands, and we can assure you that, although widely separated, we shall follow the careers of each one of you, both as undergraduates and graduates with unabating interest.

Time and again during our undergraduate course we have looked forward to this occasion as being one of the happiest of our lives, but now, when the time has come to take our departure a feeling of sadness comes over us, but we must bow to the inevitable. The class of 1900 bids farewell to these historic halls and steps-out into the "wide, wide world."

Your Honor, Mr. President and Faculty, Members of the Senate, Fellow-Alumni, and Alumnae, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is indeed a great honor to be given the privilege of addressing you on this occasion, for the few minutes assigned me, in the name of the Alumni of this institution; and to be given free rein: no warnings, no thou shalt nots, no inhibitions, no censorship. This attitude indicates that you stand for freedom of thought and speech; free to seek the truth wherever it may be found, free to voice the best which has come to you. When we look over the world today, this is no small advantage. What is there which so moves one to do his best, give himself to the task assigned him, weigh well his words, scrutinize his acts, as to feel that he is trusted, put on his honor. It is in the atmosphere of freedom, a freedom which calls for high endeavor, and takes honor for granted, that we get the best in intellect and character. Prohibition is set up to take care of weaklings, freedom is for those who would be strong: regimentation is not the way to righteousness. When however liberty runs into laxity, discipline must call back to freedom; for laxity is self-inflicted bondage, one of the most destructive forms of slavery. Man's latent powers and abilities are developed as he sets them free, and puts them into practical operation in the world in which he lives: in short by hard work and wise application. It means education translated into life.

It is a long look back since I graduated from this University in 1889. And perhaps in looking back I may idealize things as I see them at this long range. But, you have heard it said that no good biography is ever written, until the lapse of 100 years, in order to get a just perspective. Personally I am convinced that I can give a fairer estimate now, of what the University stood for in my day, than I could have given when I was a student here and saw at close range.

This Province is still very young. My great-grand-fathers on both sides of the house, were among the pioneers who came here into a virgin country. There was everything to be done. They brought little with them, save a sense of loyalty to constituted authority, a sturdy character, a love of liberty, the spirit of determination, the will to work, and an abounding faith. In such a brief period, as measured by history, it was a great accomplishment to have set up a provincial system of education, crowned by this University. You have made great strides since my day. You have been reaching out to meet the demands of the new day, and you will continue to do this. But in that day a worthy foundation has been laid, standards set up, capable teachers had been sought out, men who would have graced any institution of learning at that time,—scholars and gentlemen. They were honored and respected in the community, they stood for the best things intellectually, civically, spiritually. With them education, life and character were interwoven. This is as I see and think of them today. And this impress has remained with me through the years, and has meant very much as time has gone on. I do not want any so-called inside information, if there be such, which will take away this ideal. And I want to feel that what was true then, has been and is true today. The young men may not sense this, but, as the years go on, it will come home to them more and more, and be a great incentive in life. And let me say here that when I use the term men, it is intended to include all students,—male and female.

For me there has always persisted a lingering feeling that my teachers gave me something to live up to; and that I must not dishonor them. However frivolous our ways or great our follies, we recognized that they stood far above us in the attainments of life. And we felt they had done this by hard work, and diligent application. And when they required hard work of us, if we were to be credited with respectable standing, they were but commending a road which they had travelled. Amidst the general clamor of the world about us today, for easy comfortable lives, shorter hours, social security, freedom from exacting labor, it is of great value to have an institution, which crowns the educational system of this Province, insisting on high standards, hard work, diligent endeavor, as the sure road to stable civilization, sound character, and manhood. When faculty, governing board and alumni are at one in this conviction, the influence of the institution will be felt down and out through the whole body of the citizens of the land. Those of us who have shared in her privileges, must ever remember that much is expected of us, if we are to pass on that which has been committed to us, and thus preserve our honor and hers.

We must remember that a University, like an individual, has a soul, a character, foundation principles, standards, an inherent something which none may sin against, whether faculty, student, alumni, or governing board. Short sightedness, and silly immaturities, the growing pains of youth, may be overlooked in student days, but there is a centre which knows no compromise. Before this every loyal son bows and salutes. We try to express it in the words, "Our Alma Mater." As education broadens and life deepens, this comes home to us with renewed force. Whatever other institutions one may attend, however far afield one's calling in life may carry him, he never can forget, nor fail to honor and respect the institution which started him out in life, and helped him to lay foundations on which to build. "The rock from which he was hewn, the hole from which he was digged" ever remains holy ground. When, early in life, one has been taught to "meet on the plumb, act on the level and part on the square," he cannot in after life lightly depart from this way.

In my day the courses of study were largely prescribed. This seems much out of step with modern methods; yet in looking back, I question whether or not I would have had wisdom enough to choose as wisely as that which had been outlined for me. It covered a wide field and gave us an inkling of how very much there was awaiting those who had the will and courage to press on. We were taught, by inference at least, what my teachers in another institution constantly voiced in no uncertain words: viz, that when we graduated, we were not to imagine that our education had been completed; but that we had just entered upon the road. All they hoped to do for us was to open the door, stimulate the desire for knowledge, cultivate an appetite for learning, show us some of the methods of approach, and reveal to us some of the conclusions of other seekers after truth. If we would honor our profession, then we must continue to be students all our days: methodical, diligent, open-minded.

While it may seem, that few of my courses in College had any direct bearing on my profession, I am convinced that, indirectly, every one has been valuable. A broad general foundation is of great value for any profession. Specialization can well afford to wait, if one wishes to build wisely. One who has his heart set on immediate returns, if not guided by wise counsellors, is apt to choose what may be called bread and butter courses, and in the end find himself short of bread, with no butter, and nursing a disappointed spirit. The point is, students should think well and seek competent advice before setting out, and continue to consult those of maturer judgment. One constantly finds men filled with regrets because they had not early learned this lesson.

There is a spirit of ease abroad in the land, one which moves to seek short cuts, avoid hard work, look for advancement by the method of pull rather than push, be satisfied with the mediocre, to march with the crowd, win its praises, eat the bread of idleness, or filch it from the unsuspecting by dishonorable means. We have all too many who have just enough education to make them a menace to society; those with just enough culture to disguise the barbaric elements in their nature,—elements not yet civilized and brought into harmonious subjection. Some manage to live within the law, while others openly defy it. One is often in doubt which of these two classes is the greater burden to carry, which does more to destroy nations and people.

At all costs we must maintain the institutions which stand for education and character. All right thinking people must rally around and support them. They must be regarded not as luxuries, but as prime necessities for the well-being of the whole body. We must have leaders in the many fields of our complex civilization, those in whom dwell enlightened minds and enlightened consciences, those who bring to the community where they live, an example, an influence, a contribution which enriches, ennobles, and uplifts. We must be willing to commend, support and endow that which stands above and makes possible a stable material wealth, social happiness, culture and prosperity.

And those who have enjoyed the advantages and privileges of such institutions must realize how great a responsibility rests upon them. For, in the mind of the public, institutions are judged by their product. It is we who commend or condemn, honor or dishonor our Alma Mater. In us is seen, more strongly than in our words, the justification for asking, from the public, improved equipment, larger opportunities, increased endowments. As the graduates go out into the field of life and show they know how to meet its problems, bear its burdens, render acceptable service, give account of themselves as men of character and usefulness in their various positions and occupations, win the love and respect of the communities where they live, it is thus that they will bring joy and satisfaction to their teachers, and justify the interest and bounty of those who have planted and watered the institution. This comes home with ever increasing force as the years multiply, and we get a clearer vision of the true meaning of life. However brilliant one may be in some one particular branch of learning, there can be no deep satisfaction in being a nobody in the broad field of life. Nor can one ever be accounted a success and worthy of honor, who, in his own private life, is gnarled, twisted, dissipated, sour, friendless, unlovely. Men cannot live apart from the world and be men; and to be men they must cultivate that which other men can honor and respect as they appear in their midst. For, what we are in ourselves counts for more than what we do. The supreme product of the world is men,—men who in themselves, apart from their profession, are loved and respected. Read the lives of some of our great captains of industry, and note how, in their latter years, they prized the goodwill of their fellow-men. Some, who in their early years, had sinned grievously against the standards of society, for the sake of gain, later gave evidence of repentance by their generosity and good works.

Great advances have been made in many fields of learning, in scientific discovery, in invention, in skill, but who can fail to see the perplexity which abounds in every land today regarding the outlook of civilization. Manifestly there is a fundamental lack of that which harmonizes man's attainments, and enables him to build on a solid foundation. To go on, first building and then destroying as we have been doing for centuries, is so insane, that it bids us stop to analyze our modern ways, manners and institutions. Surely there is a way, by which nations and people can live together in peace and good will, enjoy the fruits of education, industry, culture, and refinement. And we all must know that one of the secrets of that way is high morality, in the broader meaning of that word: a keen sense of right and wrong, honor and dishonor, justice and injustice, kindness and friendliness. We try to express it all in the phrase, Christian character. And where shall we look for leaders in this field if not in our many institutions of higher learning. When high intellect and refined character enter the various professions, stand their ground and refuse to give way, they must win in the end. If the young men and women of today have an impression that every profession is so crowded, that the way is difficult, let them be assured that this is a day filled with opportunity for those who will rise to meet it. Never have we had so many positions to be filled, never has there been a more persistent call for competent persons to fill them. It may call for patient waiting and some anxiety, and this may be a part of the preparation, but eventually the way will open for those who prove their worth. And by this I do not mean just the unusual, a selected class of super-brilliants. It is true for all who will try to make the best of what they have, cultivate a disposition, a character, an intellectual grasp, and manifest a willingness to serve in the field for which they are best fitted. We are short everywhere of those of the right type. It is true in my own profession, and I get the same story from those in other callings.

There are any number of applicants, those willing to accept the position, and draw the emoluments; but it is far from easy to find those filled with the spirit of service, and willing to give of their best. There is no position which cannot be better filled by a person of education and character, than by one of the opposite type. There is still large room for professional men, who know how to win the confidence of their clients by their character and personality as well as by their technical knowledge and skill. I am frequently asked to recommend such men.

We need more men of character and education who will settle in our small towns and rural communities, accept a modest living and become leaders of the people. Many a man who is pining away in a city might here find opportunity for a very happy and fruitful life.

Perhaps one of the fields which is calling loudest today for men of character, ability, and purpose is the field of politics. It is most unfortunate that the words politics and politician have become synonymous with crookedness and dishonor. We need those who will give their lives and their talents to redeem these words, and make them stand for honor and sacred trust. It is an enormous task and calls for great courage and self-sacrifice, but the call is loud and persistent. Many nations in the past have fallen into decay because this call was not heeded, others are today on the danger list,—yours and mine.

The world has always been ruled by minorities with convictions, those aggressive and persistent; and truth is stronger than falsehood, virtue than vice, honor than dishonor, light than darkness. If we ourselves are educated men, lovers of truth, students, workers, let us prove it in the field of practical life; let us hear the call of the world about us, and go forth with ever increasing courage to prove ourselves "workmen who need not be ashamed."

Mr. McNair advised the graduates to practice self-discipline and control and to be tolerant in dealing with important problems. He cautioned them against the danger of losing the spirit of enthusiasm.

"The capacity for enthusiasm is a wonderful quality. It is the normal gift of all of us. The difficulty is to retain it," stated the speaker. "We who are your seniors fully realize that at times it is charged that we are lacking in vision and fire and then to grow incapable of doing things in a grand and spectacular way. May I suggest to you, however, that you too will have your disillusionments."

The speaker referred to the Great War and the disillusionment that it brought about. "We had been nurtured in the belief that war was a grand and glorious enterprise. We learned through bitter experience that it is at times just a grim necessity," he said.

Mr. McNair remarked that the youth of his generation differed little from the youth of today, except that perhaps today there is a little more impatience and a slightly greater tendency to express it.

"There is, however, nothing in that alone to cause anxiety," he continued. "The art of criticism is one of the indicia of civilization. It flowers best where learning abounds. As a means of self-expression of persuasion it tends to supplant primitive methods through which personal view are expressed in more physical ways. Nevertheless, unless the exercise of that art is controlled by a sense of balance and proportion, it may prove as destructive as the native method of persuasion.

"To live together and to work in unison for the advancement of the interests of ourselves and our fellows," stated Mr. McNair, "self-discipline and control are essential, and above all else, tolerance."

In concluding the speaker urged the graduates to exercise these qualities in the years to come in new associations that may be formed, in the professions, the churches, the family circles and in the field of politics and government.

"If during your stay here you have truly learned the worth of the attributes of heart and mind to which I have referred—self discipline and control and the capacity to appreciate the other fellow’s viewpoint—then you shall go forth from these halls equipped in all points to carry on in whatever new associations you may form, according to the ideals of your alma mater, as reflected in the lives of a long line of illustratrious sons and daughters.

"It is with a strong belief that you are so endowed that we this afternoon bid you godspeed," he concluded.

Seeking a theme that would seem to justify this return from across a continent to impose myself on you for half an hour. I found a keynote in a comment of the eminent late Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States:

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged: it is the skin of a living thought and may vary in colour and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."

For the past forty years in Canada, the word "forestry" pre-eminently has been the "skin of a living thought". It has cloaked three revolutionary developments:
A complete and world-wide change in the importance of wood in human economy—a new wood.
A rapidly changing concept of the role of forests and forestry—a new forest.
An outstanding challenge to the young people and the educational institutions of the country—a new challenge.

"The New Wood"

Primitive man, his world and his development, offer a fascinating field for study and speculation. One may well wonder how he ever managed to survive at all. Too slow to run away from his fleeter enemies, too puny to match their strength, too big to hide under a stone, too small to inspire any fear, he might well have perished in his first immature stages as thousands of other nascent species of animals must have done, and many as fully developed and apparently better equipped we know did.

Anthropologists tell us that one important factor in his survival was the odd, and apparently trivial, ability man developed to oppose his thumb to the rest of his hand, thereby acquiring a firm grip—and the two things he first gripped certainly must have been a stone and a wooden stick.

Almost certainly wood was the first material that prehistoric man adapted to his use as a tool, a weapon, or a convenience. It was his first fuel. It first introduced to mankind the principles of mechanics. We may reasonably suppose that his first use of wood was in the form of a stick, and it is hard to imagine that with a stick in his hand that stick was not almost at once a lever; or that, having discovered the lever and the interesting and important fact that with it he could move weights far beyond the limits of his natural strength, the round stick did not almost at once become a roller. It is equally hard to imagine that the wheel was conceived from any other source than the roller.

Mechanics has added very little to the fundamental lever, roller, and wheel known to prehistoric man through the accident of round wood—accident, because there seems to be no reason why nature should not have developed a square tree trunk which would have halted our development in mechanics in the lever stage for untold centuries. We owe, then, to a few freaks of evolution and to round wood the very survival of man and the inspiration for, and the physical development of, his mechanical genius, but insofar as anything basically new was concerned that genius seems to have suffered a complete eclipse for a long period of centuries. Perhaps we should say, rather, that, having discovered and used the initial fundamental principles handed to him by nature in a round stick did not almost at once become a roller. It is equally hard to imagine to nature's gift for a long period of centuries.

Mankind progressed from wood to stone, to metals, added metal to metal, and discovered the secret of alloys, but wood remained just wood, always increasingly useful, but always just wood.

High Skill

Long before the dawn of history, we had attained a high degree of skill in its use. King "Tut" (1350 B.C.) had beautiful furniture of wood, decorated with ivory and metal work, that would do credit to master-craftsmen of today. His workmen made boards, timbers, and veneers, from which they fashioned their finished products.

Less than a hundred years ago, more than three thousand years after King "Tut's" workmen fashioned their boards, our wood-workers, and wood-users, had boards, timbers, and veneers, and the veneers were held in place by the same glue, the product of boiling horns and hoofs, that King "Tut's" craftsmen used.

Had not one, Alexander Buntin, built the first wood pulp plant in America at Valleyfield, Quebec, in 1867 (first wood pulp used for paper—1860), we could have moved our date of transition ahead another fifty or sixty years to well within the range of postgraduate days of the majority of this assembly.

Now witness the transition in the short space of our own experience to the "sew wood" of 1947.

Boards, timbers and veneers still are important items in our wood world, but we have today some boards and veneers that our Egyptian craftsmen hardly could have imagined. This bit of board has been given the unlovely name of "compreg"—45 laminated sheets of thin veneer adding up to 0.8 inches have been interleaved with a plastic resin and pressed into a stable waterproof, and more or less homogeneous mass of wood and resin, five-eighths the thickness of its component parts and approximately twice their density (S.G. 1.02), three to four times the normal strength of wood (tensile strength 37.000 lbs. to wood 8000/1800,) of the same dimensions and comparing favourably with wrought iron (37,000:-45.000), compressed and impregnated—hence "compreg".

And here is a sheet of "three-ply veneer," each sheet cut 5/1000 of an inch thick, defects cut out, edge glued, and finally assembled into a single sheet 15/1000 of an inch thick, with amazing qualities of flexibility and strength. This, incidentally, is the skin of the famous Spitfire and Mosquito fighter planes.

No Longer Just Wood

These examples could be multiplied a thousand times, but the marvels of the "new wood" range as well into an entirely different field. Wood, no longer, is just wood.

Alexander Buntin turned wood into paper in 1867 at the then amazing rate of two and one-half tons per day. Modern newsprint mills make a minimum of about two hundred tons of paper per day, and six hundred to eight hundred tons per day are made in some of the more than one hundred mills in Canada. Paper is one of the most familiar of wood's disguises.

At least one laboratory has succeeded in hydrogenating wood. The resulting substance is a heavy viscous mixture similar to crude oil, from which can be distilled countless fractions, including alcohols, glycols, glycerine, and phenols for making plastics. Under various treatments developed during very recent years, wood has graduated from the status of a very useful, but not very versatile, material handed to us in the "finished" form by nature, to the unaccustomed role of an airy, fairy, wonder substance that masquerades in any one of a thousand transmutations.

We have been familiar with "wooden" paper for about seventy-five years, and with "wooden" textiles for about twenty-five years. Now, "Imagine that you can drop a few tons of tree tops, branches, sawdust, slabs and other waste into a hopper of a great plant, and that then you can walk to the other end of the plant and turn a spigot marked 'lignogene' and get a high-octane fuel
for your car: another marked 'vitamins' and get a package of concentrated vitamins from wood yeast; another marked 'fridgolene' and get a fine anti-freeze agent; another marked 'aquavit' and get a potable drink: imagine this and you will be guilty of over-simplification and exaggeration, but you will not violate basic fact".

Dr. Fernow wrote: "It may be stated without tear of contradiction that outside of food products no material is so universally used and so indispensable in human economy as wood". A recent review says. "More than any other raw material wood disregards the boundaries separating substances from their functions".

German Intention

We are told that Germany actually planned economic and industrial world domination on the basis of wood as a basic raw material, giving wood the descriptive name of "universalrohstoff". In this scheme the derivatives and uses of wood were listed on the basis of known facts and experience in the following order of importance:
Solid and liquid fuels.
Food and fodder.
Cellulose and textile fibre.
Structural material
Basic materials for chemical industry
Wood has traveled far during the past twenty-five years, and certainly has not reached the end of its course.

It is axiomatic that man lives only by virtue of his natural resources. We have attained to a high degree of skill in fashioning, fabricating, and adapting nature’s gifts to our use and our peculiar needs. We can transform, but we have yet to create an ounce of food or of raw material. A country’s natural resources are the measure of its potential wealth. Its economic development and intellectual culture will determine the use it makes of that wealth; and the wisdom with which the natural resources are managed, used, and conserved, in turn, will determine in large measure the level of the material, intellectual, and cultural development of the country—a beneficent circle.

Here in Canada we have been abundantly blessed with a wealth of natural resources—rich soils, abundant minerals, fish, game, water power, invigorating climate and widespread forests of the most useful of the tree species of the world. They all contribute their share to our livelihood, and the loss or the serious depletion of any one of these resources would have an immediate effect on our scale of living, nation-wide. The loss or serious depletion of our farm or forest resource would be a major national disaster. Both are possibilities to be seriously considered and forestalled; and, without making any dogmatic assertions, it is not impossible that forests, to us here in Canada, may be the more important of the two, with their widespread bearing on such influences as water, erosion and climate, in addition to their own intrinsic value. Unquestionably, the forests have been the most despoiled and stand in the greater danger of nation-crippling depletion.

Time, circumstance, scientist and laboratory have created for us a "new wood" giving promise of a new level of wealth and culture. If we are to inherit that promise in all its attractive possibilities, we must create for ourselves a "new forest".

"The New Forest"

Pioneer peoples in a new land always have been prodigal in the use of their new-found wealth and opportunities.

Extravagant and improvident use of wood resources had so far depleted the formerly widespread forests of Palestine, Asia Minor, and Greece that by the eleventh century, B.C., wood was at a premium, and timber for important buildings had to be brought from long distances. Solomon, and his father, David, before him, had to send to Hiram, King of Tyre, for timbers from Mount Lebanon, algum, fir and cedar, which were brought "in floats by sea to Joppa", and carried thence overland to Jerusalem. But Alexander found these forests of Lebanon, the last forest reserve of the then civilized world, practically exhausted (333 B.C.). Italy, China, Central Europe, every "civilized" country, followed suit.

History brings before us the accumulated experience of the ages in proper perspective, enabling us to analyse cause and effect. From its lessons we should be able to understand the background of existing problems, and plan their rational solution. Forest history teaches that it has not been until imminent disaster has threatened that people have learned to treat their forests as a crop and manage them as such; and it has been only the few more progressive nations that have had the foresight to heed the warnings and profit by it. The result is that we Canadians have before us examples and for our guidance the whole story from abundant wood supply to depletion, and through depletion to rehabilitation on the one hand, or to complete exhaustion on the other.

An address of this description is a poor medium for imparting detailed statistics, and I have no intention of trying your patience with any such. I can assure you, however, that official reports and statisticians, foresters, and forest services tell us that:

More than one-third of the land area of Canada (1.290.960 square miles, or 37%) is forested, in comparison with less than one-sixth (16%) considered to be of present or potential value for agriculture.

Our average annual depletion, used and lost (3,150 million cubic feet), is just about 1% of our total stand of commercial species (311.201 million cubic feet ).

On the subject of increment, or the annual growth offsetting annual depletion, our authorities start to hedge, usually contenting themselves with pointing out that our forest lands should be capable of producing more than we are using, as undoubtedly they should, and that growth is not more than one half of what they could be made to grow under only reasonably good management, which, again, unquestionably is right. Whether they are producing as much as we are using, and when we are going to have them under reasonably good management, are questions still to be answered.

Pattern Of Pioneer People

In the meantime, for fifty to three hundred years past, depending on the region, we have followed, Canada-wide, the historic pattern of pioneer people.

When the white man first came to Canada he found such an overpowering abundance of mature timber that he in his day and with his limited markets and manufacturing facilities and his preoccupation with the essentials of food and shelter, understandably was quite unable to conceive of any shortage of timber. Yet it is amazing how quickly the warning conditions developed. We are told that local industry suffered from exhaustion of accessible timber and fuel supplies before our people began to move west; but roads pushed farther afield, railways, canals, and streams improved for driving, brought relief from hitherto inaccessible regions. Always there was more timber beyond, and temporary embarrassments were soon forgotten. An approved pattern of "progress" and expansion developed in Ontario and held sway for decades. First, the surveyor was sent ahead of the outposts to establish the boundaries of new townships. Next, the logger was encouraged to remove the best of the timber as rapidly as possible. Finally, came the settler, who, without reference to the quality of the soil, was to turn "stump" land into a Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, forest land is not necessarily, indeed, seldom is, arable land. The settler eked out an existence at subsistence level for some years and then, broken and disillusioned, abandoned the attempt.

The Maritime Provinces do not appear to have made any concentrated effort to colonize non-arable forest lands, but otherwise do not appear to have been able to see farther ahead in their forest problems, or to better insure their perpetuation, than the rest of the nation.

The rugged terrain of the Pacific Coast never did engender any rosy dreams of agricultural pre-eminence, but its vast expanse of forest did foster the equally disastrous and false impression of an "inexhaustible resource".

Only an isolated few have looked very far into the future and sounded any note of warning.

MacDonald's Forecast

Sir John A. MacDonald, looking daily down on the Ottawa River, wrote in June 1871 to the premier of Ontario:

"The sight of the immense masses of timber passing my windows every morning constantly suggests to my mind the absolute necessity there is for looking at the future of this great trade. We are recklessly destroying the timber of Canada and there is scarcely the possibility of replacing it. The quantity of timber reaching Quebec is annually decreasing and the fires in the woods are periodically destroying millions in money. What is to become of the Ottawa region generally, after the timber is cut away, one cannot foresee. It occurs to me that the subject should be looked in the face and some efforts made for the preservation of our timber. The Dominion government having no lands has no direct interest in the subject, but it seems to me that it would be a very good thing for the two governments of Ontario and Quebec to issue a joint commission to examine the whole subject and to report:
As to the best means of cutting the timber after some regulated plan, as in Norway and the Baltic;
As to replanting so as to keep up the supply as in Germany and Norway; and
As to the best way of protecting the woods from fire.

Rise of Two Forest Schools

Sir Wilfred Laurier convened a historic forest conference at Ottawa in 1906, which had much to do with the awakening of an interest in Canada's forests and forest problems and the establishing of our first two Canadian Schools of Forestry at Toronto in 1907 and at U.N.B. in 1908.

Some theoretically excellent forest laws have been passed in some provinces but by and large the forests have been left to the not too tender mercies of private enterprise in the woods. We have suffered from an almost complete lack of an accurate knowledge of the extent of the resource, an accurate inventory, and from a lack of reliable data on growth rates. We have suffered from a lack of trained men to gather the essential data, analyse it, and to educate the public. We have suffered from the very abundance of our wood supply that always provided more a little further on while the most valuable and accessible forest lands close to centres of population were wastefully logged, burned, reburned, and permitted to develop into barren waste. Sir John A. MacDonald, looking down on the Ottawa River from his office window in 1871, was watering the "square timber" trade at its peak. To Sir John the timber trade mean: "square timber" of white pine. He accurately assessed the portent of his "annually decreasing" deliveries to the ships at Quebec, and we, too, seventy-five years later, know "there is scarcely the possibility of replacing it". But other frontiers, especially in British Columbia, other methods, and other uses postponed the reckoning which we now approach, and certainly will not be able to sidestep, as sawmills, railways, a Panama Canal, and Douglas fir enabled us to side-step exhaustion of the white pine.

We have taken a hasty glance back over the trend of forest history, but it is not our purpose here tonight to make excuses, or to shoulder blame onto our grandfathers. Rather, we seek to recognize a position and shape some future policy. Our grandfathers had their own problems and they met them in the tradition of English-speaking people in their own way. If by chance they made mistakes and left us somewhat less well provided for than they might that is a poor excuse for us to abandon our surest and most valuable source of wealth, or unwittingly, and dimwittedly, to let it slip through our fingers. The old forest of magnificent white pine is gone; spruce is reduced to fence rail proportions; and the majestic centuries old Douglas fir of the Pacific Coast is on its way out.

Canada never can be completely denuded of forest growth of some value. Our resources in forest lands are so great that nature will grow some timber in spite of the worst we can do. But nature's best in active competition with man's worst will be a poor and poverty-stricken substitute for what we might enjoy.

Liquidation

The simple fact is that so-called "forestry" in Canada to date has consisted of little more than the liquidation, usually wasteful liquidation, of a gift crop handed to us by nature. Logging is not forestry. Forestry is the growing of successive crops of wood in the greatest quantity and the highest quality that your land is capable of producing; and I do not know of any forest on any acre in Canada, with the possible exception of a few acres in Government and University experimental forests, that are being so managed. The history of our forest lands is written plainly in the woods for any who care to read, a history of steady deterioration in quality and quantity of wood produced; and the history is the same Canada-wide. Here in New Brunswick and the east, axe, ox team, and sailing ships of the early days slowed the process down to stretch it out over two hundred years. On the Pacific Coast, our power saws, logging railways, diesel trucks, and modern freighters, merely telescoped the process into a short fifty years. The end results have been much the same—denuded lands, deteriorated stands, and poor prospects for a second crop and established industries and communities.

The old forest, the gift of nature from which Canadians have drawn about twenty-five per cent, of their livelihood, is going, or gone. The "New Forest" will be no gift. It will be grown, cultivated, managed, and protected to maturity by us if we are to have forests worth the name at all.

Therein is the new challenge—a challenge as old as the forest problem, dating in Canada at least from Sir John A. MacDonald's concern for his white pine timbers, but ever new until it is faced and adequately disposed of.

"The New Challenge"

We have said that the forests rank high amongst our natural resources. They are not presently the greatest, but in a country approximating ninety per cent, forest land and so situated as to be admirably adapted to the growing of wood, they can be made the greatest without in any way detracting from the value of the others. The gross gain in forest values is net gain in national wealth. Nothing is detracted from anything else. They now account for a sufficiently great part of our living to be disastrous in their loss—and their progressive loss is more than a mere threat. Their influences impinge on every aspect of our life.

Foresters and conservationists have reiterated so often the forest's complementary functions in such matters as regulation of stream flow, control of floods and erosion, production of fur and game, and aesthetic values, that one feels that these influences, intangible as they are, have lost their impact on the well-informed audience. These values are there, they go with the forest and will be lost when we lose the forest, and, intangible as they are, their worth to the nation probably exceeds the value of all direct forest employment and income.

But forests reach still deeper down into our national and economic life. To choose a single significant example, we need more population in Canada. Vancouver Island (12.408 square miles) is approximately the size of Switzerland (1.944 square miles). Vancouver Island is richer than Switzerland in natural resources, enjoys one of the finest climates in the world, and has unequalled appeal to the tourist. The Island supports a population of 177,000, compared to Switzerland's 4.066,400 (1 to 23). This is a condition that is nothing short of dangerous in the present stare of world affairs and it is common Canada-wide. Vancouver Island's forests, put on a sustained yield managed basis, and supplemented with the processing industries they would support, would insure the future prosperity of its present population, and go far toward solving the labor and employment problem for the additional one or two million souls it should be called upon to support.

All this adds up to a challenge of first magnitude for the younger generation of Canadians. Budding young undergraduate foresters may have failed to find any great spiritual uplift in cruise lines that always run uphill, ring-infested stumps that defy counting, back-packing, mosquitoes, black flies, or in bough beds that never prove to be as soft or as aromatic as the poet would have us believe; but if they are to be foresters worth their salt they will in time find something in today's challenge to fire the imagination, to give incentive for great work, and to compensate in large measure for some of the dollars they need scarcely hope to amass in their chosen profession. On their shoulders, and on the Universities, in this forest-dependent country, will rest, in at least equal measure with agriculture and industry, the responsibility for feeding the Canadian people; and, in greater measure, the responsibility for Canada's cultural level and scale of living.

Infant Profession

We older, early graduates of our first forest schools, newcomers in an infant profession, had little chance to practice forestry. When I went first to British Columbia we still thought there that we had somewhere in the neighborhood of a two-hundred-year supply of virgin timber; and less than twenty years ago in that province I listened to one of our most prominent foresters ridicule the idea of sustained yield management before a meeting of the Canadian Society of Forest Engineers. Under the prevailing public sentiment and laws of the land, Canada-wide, our job, perforce, was to assist in the progressive liquidation of the existing asset. If in spite of that we managed to wedge in enough surveys, research, investigation, and education along rational forestry lines finally to break the ice of public indifference, as in most regions we have with the encouragement and connivance of a certain few farsighted legislators and the press, then we have accomplished about as much as reasonably could have been expected of us. But forest management is a very long-term undertaking and any drawing back, more particularly in the critical stages of early development, is likely to ruin all progress made to date.

It is significant that the press, our legislators, and people generally, have stopped referring to our "inexhaustible resources".

Even though the Dominion Government still fails to protect its own indirect but enormous income from forest resources by assisting the provinces in such matters as forest protection, responsible Ministers of the Crown have admitted the responsibility. In December, 1945, the Minister of Mines and Resources issued a statement which included this comment: "The nation cannot afford to see forests, as a source of raw materials, dissipated. It is believed that the Dominion could properly assist the orderly development of the national forest resources in two directions, first, by expanding activities for which it would be fully responsible, and second, by assisting through provision of funds to raise provincial standards in respect of the conservation, protection and development of the provincial forest resources."

British Columbia, by Royal Commission, has recently (January,1946), completed a second exhaustive study of the forest situation in that province and has within the past few weeks passed some of the most constructive and far-reaching sustained yield measures yet enacted in Canada.

Ontario and Saskatchewan have recently completed similar investigations.

The time is ripe, and the prospects were never brighter, for a concentrated effort on the part of the Canadian people to turn over a new leaf in forest management; to lift the forest resource out of the sink hole of liquidation and put it on the solid foundation of rational management. It will be a long process, stretching over the next hundred years, calling for unremitting vigilance, effort and leadership. Those responsibilities fall now, at a most critical period, on the forest schools and on the men now entering the forest profession.

Number Inadequate

Since the first classes were graduated about 1910 by the newly-established Forest Schools at Toronto and U.N.B, we have trained, as nearly as I have been able to learn, about nine hundred foresters, or an average of about twenty-five per year. During this University year now closing there were about one thousand students in the four forestry schools, and the prospects appear to be that this number will be increased by twenty-five per cent, in 1948. I detect some uneasiness as to whether Canada can absorb any such numbers of trained foresters.

In the light of the problems we have to solve that fear is ridiculous. The number is inadequate.

In the light of the values and profits involved, any such fear is short-sighted and clearly brands a timid and wavering approach to the development of our most valuable asset and business prospect.

Will Need Them

From the immediate, personal, but highly practical, standpoint of whether these men will be able to find a job, my opinion is that we will find employment for all who will be graduated from the present enrolment, and will continue to need foresters in like numbers. We have been deprived of the services of perhaps two hundred young foresters who normally would have been graduated during the war years. There are more than that number of forestry jobs vacant at the present time; and one thousand men in training does not mean one thousand foresters. There is a heavy normal "wastage" during the four or five years intervening between entrance and graduation. There is a
further wastage after graduation that always will be operative no matter how many positions may be vacant, or how urgently the men may be needed in the work for which they have trained. One thousand men in the schools probably means not more than one hundred graduated per year, of whom between fifty and seventy-five may be expected to be employed in forestry work after the lapse of ten years. In view of the fact that men with forestry training are always in demand in the closely allied activities of logging and manufacturing, the promising development in forestry practice which will call for more and more practicing foresters in industrial employ, the need for more men in the various Government Forest Services, and the obvious necessity of raising to professional level many jobs now occupied by "practical" men. I find considerable encouragement for the future of forestry and nothing to arouse fear in an enrolment of one thousand men in the Forest Schools.

Conclusion

We have endeavored this evening, in the course of less than 60 minutes, to make a quick summary of centuries of forest and wood history, and to relate that history to the present situation and future prospects in Canada.

Perhaps we have not made faster progress in applied forestry because we have tried to cover too much ground; because the few have wanted to move too fast and consequently have run into the stone wall of characteristic reluctance on the part of most people to abandon the old, or to adopt the new. Always, too, there has been the difficulty of "getting across" the proper perspective. Marie Antoinette, confronted with the inconceivable idea of the masses needing and crying for bread, is reported to have asked in amazement. "Why don't you give them cake?" Going about our affairs in Victoria at a temperature of 40 degrees above, it really means nothing to us when we read that Snag Creek is suffering at 80 degrees below (Daily Press, Feb. 3). You must have experienced 50 or 60 degrees below zero to imagine what 80 below means. The rich simply cannot appreciate the misery and frustration that goes with poverty, and Canada will find it extremely difficult to appreciate what a scarcity of wood will mean.

It is quite possible that we in Canada have been a little too rich for our own good, and certainly we have no general conception of what forest depletion will do to us as a nation. With our background we cannot conceive of any such thing as a ruinous wood shortage; and that ruinous shortage, if we permit it to come, has been developing, and will develop, so gradually that succeeding generations will have no clear-cut standards for comparison.

Canada has depended, and continues to depend, to such an extent on wood that, without it, and in spite of our other life-saving natural resources, we would be a poverty-stricken nation.

Always A Mainstay

Wood has always been a mainstay of the human race.

Today, the field of usefulness of wood and its value has so widened that we are quite justified in talking of the "New Wood" as if of an entirely new resource.

Canada depends on wood for about twenty-five per cent, of her income. The proportion is so great that its loss would be disastrous.

Ontario has thousands of acres of drifting and eroding sands that once supported their most valuable white pine stands.

British Columbia has twenty million acres of denuded forest lands, and if lately applied measures, too recent to judge effects, do not have the desired results, we are adding to these denuded areas every year more acres than an expensive planting program of twenty million trees per year will rehabilitate.

A combination of circumstances have conspired to aggravate a situation already critical and now threatening to become worse.

Improvement and eventual remedy will arise out of a clear recognition of the facts, a will to remedy, and an adequate number of trained foresters for leadership and technical direction. Foresters of the right calibre and in sufficient numbers will hasten the public education and crystalize the will.

Century And A Half

For nearly one hundred and fifty years U.N.B. has been doing the work that the small University is best fitted to accomplish, sending out into the world a steady leaven of educated young men and women, unspoiled by luxury, serious-minded, of high ideals, and admirably adapted and equipped for leadership. After an absence of twenty-seven years, during which I have had some opportunity to observe apparently more favored centres of learning, I have no desire to see U.N.B. a “great institution” in the commonly accepted sense of the term. Already for more than one hundred years U.N.B. has been great in its service in New Brunswick and Canada. I confidently expect it to be greater in that best sense of the word—and in this "new" field of forestry it has an unequalled opportunity to add measurably to its greatness.

The custom here and everywhere is to give advice to graduating students. You needn't take it - but we are compelled to give it. Advice is a passion with us; we can't help it. You have an option to accept that advice; we have an obligation to give it. Old people are spilling over with advice to the new generation. So here we go.

You will become scientists and engineers, economists, doctors, and ministers of the Gospel. Many will take part in politics and some will plan to make money. These will be lawyers.

I say to you study the philosophy of John Calvin. You need not accept his faith in the damnation of unbaptized infants, and you may doubt his belief in "one for heaven and ten for hell" – though I admit he was a brilliant mathematician.

It is John Calvin’s commercial philosophy that I recommend to you. It is the basis of our business structure. It was the foundation of our system of commerce; it was the origin of our form of international trade; and it is all summed up in the shorter catechism – it is forbidden "whatsoever doth or may unjustly hinder our own or our neighbor’s wealth or outward estate". In other words, to do your duty by the community, you must be good doctors, engineers, lawyers, and good money makers too, if you adopt that vocation. Some teachers tell us that it would be a terribly lonely business to know how to do something well, if we are advancing a personal interest. They are the critics of individualism, the exponents of economic planning, and the advocates of the principle of equal misery.

John Calvin gave us a stouter lesson and it was the custom of this good man, John Calvin, to hold a weekly meeting of the just – and all the citizens of his Kingdom of Geneva were looked on as just men. Everybody was summoned to appear before him. The righteous were permitted to point out the faults of each other. The meeting always lasted all day long and well into the night. There never was any absenteeism. Thus Calvin taught his disciples: "Do not fear criticism; stand up for your beliefs".

Now, just like my master, Calvin, I have a few words of counsel to offer too. I would say to you – do not rely too much on experience, yours or mine. Rather trust to the gift of improvisation which is the gift of invention in its most primitive form. It is the art of dealing with the unexpected and snatching some advantage from it. The unexpected often happens. Plans go awry. The planners must not put too much faith in their plans. Many plans are born to be scrapped. The man who relies purely on plans runs into disaster sooner or later. The man who can improvise snatches triumph from catastrophe.

It is in war that we have learned the full value of improvisation, and in war we get lessons that are rude and violent, as more than half the audience know only too well.

Now, war shows us that we must trust to improvisation and also to individualism. Study, I ask you, the life of Churchill in war. Churchill, the individualist, who shows us how to improvise.

It was in 1940 – the Autumn – while invasion still threatened the coast of Britain, that Churchill sent his one and only armored division to the Middle East to defend the Suez Canal, and the Canal was held against Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, Roumanians. That triumph of defence was a great individual decision; that was an act of improvisation of a daring character.

Britain’s struggle against foreign invasion under Churchill is in truth an epic of improvisation and individualism. The defence of England turned upon opportunities seized, on chances taken, on individual decisions and improvised situations. How to meet the virtual certainty of invasion from the French coast? Everything depended upon British domination of the air over England. And domination depended upon a supply of fighter planes. The Battle of Britain – won by scrapping plans and improvising planes. The plans would have lead to certain defeat; the planes gave Britain victory.

There was, of course, a severe shortage of aluminium. Said Churchill, "Wood is plentiful, and furniture makers. Very well. A wooden airplane". Hence the improvisation of the Mosquito – nearly first among war planes.

His journeys abroad all over the Allied world. Five times in war I traveled with Churchill. There was no provision for those expeditions in the book of the rules. The first journey was in 1940 in the month of June. The French Army was beaten and in disorderly retreat. The book of rules won’t help now. Important members of the French Cabinet had gathered at Tours. They were debating a plan for an armistice. Churchill was warned of pending disaster by his own ambassador. Instantly, he decided to make an appearance at the French Cabinet. He left for Tours at once and arrived there in the morning. The airfield had been heavily bombed. There was difficulty in making a landing, particularly as he was escorted by sixteen fighter aircraft to protect him against enemy airplanes. After landing, he was confronted by blocked roads filled with refugees. Progress in the direction of Tours was almost impossible, but expedients brought us at last to a restaurant. The cupboard was bare. The refugees had eaten up everything, and not a morsel of food was to be found. Churchill insisted on having something to eat before he went to the French Cabinet meeting. An officer provided a few scraps – not much.

When he reached the Mayoralty, Mandel was in the room of the Mayor and he was talking on telephones and picking chicken bones. Renaud, the Prime Minister, did not appear for some time. When he did come, Churchill was seated opposite him in an armchair, gripping the arms and speaking with such passion as to move all those who heard him to the deepest emotion. What did Churchill ask? That the French fleet should be safe and free; that the French Cabinet should be set up on French colonial soil in Africa.

One Under Minister who was present in that room did not sit at table with those of Cabinet rank. He stood by the door as if he were an interloper. Tall, gloomy, determined, and undaunted in disaster, that Under Minister was General De Gaulle.

It was a story of individualism that Churchill unfolded when he went to Tours in that day of June, 1940!

Newfoundland in the month of August, 1941. A meeting with the President of the United States – the first meeting between these two leaders of men. The United States was not at war in August, 1941. Churchill improvised to some purpose on that occasion. He prepared the draft of the Atlantic Charter, and the President of the United States accepted the Churchill text. It was for Churchill "a day’s march nearer home".

By December 1941 – Churchill wanted more "tools to finish the job". – Did he wait upon the organization? Did he trust to the machine? Not at all! Churchill, the individualist, set out for Washington in search of weapons for British soldiers and ships for British sailors. That first war trip to America was the maiden journey of the warship "Duke of York". She was really a submarine masquerading as a battleship and running practically all the way under the sea. She had plenty of guns but her gunners had not been trained. Her crew was new – many of them had not been to sea before. The escort of British destroyers could not keep up with us on account of bad weather. We left that escort in our wake when we were hardly out of sight of the shores of England. We sailed down the French coast within easy reach of any German airplanes, for at that time France was occupied. If we had been spotted, the battle would have been an unequal one – no destroyers, no aircraft carriers, just a lonely battleship. But in the fact of all danger, Churchill’s holiday spirit prevailed.

The return journey by airplane. Mr. Churchill flew to Bermuda where he arrived at noon. He had just endured three exhausting weeks of vital economic and strategic discussions with the President and his advisers. He had spoken to the combined session of the American Congress and to the Canadian Parliament. He had never rested. He left Bermuda the next morning on an arduous and dangerous flight direct from Bermuda to Britain. The airplane had a ceiling of only 6,000 feet; 25,000 feet would have been more suitable. Icing conditions certainly would prevail – and certainly did prevail. Never before had such a type of airplane flown so long a distance. He was accompanied by the Chief of the Navy, the Chief of the Army, and the Chief of the Airforce, and me.

There were other journeys too. They formed no part of the system of war organization, which I often thought was growing bigger than the war. Over organization, which takes the punch out of war.

But in peace, as in war, do not read too long the way which paralyzes individualism or the power to act will be atrophied. Minds will be hedged about with fears and indecisions. The art of dealing with the unexpected is lost when a man is waiting on a machine, an organization, or a committee. And the lamps of passion and conviction burn low when we do not seek by every instrument of persuasion or education to maintain the individual’s judgment and conscience. There is not substitute for the individual.

Now, some advice to the students who have been selected for overseas scholarships. You will see something of the weather that made the British Empire, for of course it was the British summer that drove the Scots to Canada, the Irish to Australia, and English to New Zealand. Only the Welsh were left and they went into politics.

As the years passed by, some of the hardier spirits from the Empire began to drift back to the Mother Country. I, myself, went over there thirty-seven years ago. It was a fine summer. I was completely deceived. I stayed on. But every time I see rain in June, I plan to go back to the Empire – to Jamaica, or even to Fiji – perhaps to New Brunswick.

And now it is the turn of the overseas students to go and have a look at England. Some of them may be tempted to stay – I hope so. For the Empire people living in Great Britain are a small minority. We need all the support that we can get. Not that we are oppressed. The British people are very tolerant. They put up with a good deal from us, but they don’t pay much attention to what we say.

For instance, I have been trying to tell the British public about the Empire. They were kind about it and quite polite. Nobody ever said, that is in public, "Well, why don’t you go back to the Empire?" Although I have the impression that it was occasionally said behind closed doors.

I tried this Empire society on the Conservatives. Sometimes they thought it would lose the election, and sometimes they thought it would win the election. They blew hot, and they blew very cold, but always when it came to action, they ran away from the Empire Policy. I tried it on the Labor Party, but that was no good at all. I even tried it on the Liberals, but in Great Britain, the Liberals at present are in the shadows. And finally, when the parties were united in the one grand ragbag of a government, I put the Empire Policy to all of them and at that moment the Government broke into pieces. Not one of the pieces adopted the Policy, but when the "Tories" – that’s what the Conservatives are called over in England – lost the election, some of them turned around and blamed it on me, and my Empire propaganda.

But there it is – the British have not been too harsh with us from over the seas. They put me in the House of Lords where I have no power. So, if any of you decide to stay there, you know what to expect. At the very worst, it will be the House of Lords.

To those of you who have not had overseas service during the war. If you are to know Britain, then you must know the life of Britain in 1940. The blackout. The trenches in the public parks and squares. The sandbags piled up for the protection of the doors of public buildings. The ghostly scene in the moonlit streets. A London that had never been known before, and which we hope will never be known again. The drone of engines as enemy planes passed over the city spying out the targets in preparation for the raids to come – flights undertaken with the deliberate purpose of making an onslaught on the nerves and endurance of the British people.

The long cloudless days of one of the finest summers England has ever known. The short nights that brought relief to those having tempermental dispositions towards the war. And as summer bloomed – the crash. The defences of Europe in ruins. The British Army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Britain almost defenceless. When suddenly with a wave of spirit comparable only to a tidal bore, the British people rose up in their determination. They would not yield. They would make no terms with the enemy. The fight would be carried on even to the final destruction of the race.

Then the factory wheels began to turn – to turn with a speed and direction that spoke well for the reconstruction of the defences which none doubted in those months of June and July, 1940, must soon be put to shattering and conclusive test.

Gone were all thoughts of a 40 hour week – of a 50 hour week even. For weeks on end, some men and many women worked 70 hours in their grim determination that the country should be provided with the weapons without which Britain must assuredly perish.

It was to America that we turned in that hour of peril, and we found a people willing to receive us, ready to help us, all of them filled with hope, some of them with high confidence too. We placed our orders.

At the same time, let it be said that the orders placed in the States for aircraft, for engines, for guns, for ammunition, far exceeded the cash resources of Britain. The barrel was emptied and even the bottom was scraped. Out of all this expenditure of British gold, of British dollars, of American securities owned by Britain, out of the liquidation of vast British enterprises situated in the United States, Britain not only supplemented her own aircraft production in the most effective manner, but also laid the foundations, set up the machinery, provided the trained personnel and established the system on which the American Airforce was expanded and equipped for the battlefront when the United States was challenged by Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Thus it was that the resources of Britain were dissipated; thus a wealthy nation with a mighty exchequer and vast credit was stripped in a matter of a few months of much of its wealth.

I remember the occasion when the Chancellor of the Exchequer told Mr. Churchill and his colleagues that the vast resources of Britain were exhausted, the bank balances dissipated. No more money available for the payment of current accounts. That was the position of Britain in the early months of 1941.

Meanwhile, a merciless onslaught was taking terrible toll of the productions facilities up and down the country. Coventry, nerve centre of the aircraft industry, was bombed and production damaged. Essential aircraft engines were delayed in delivery, machine tools wrecked, and the rhythm of production interfered with to a distressing extent.

Southampton was attacked, the home of the Spitfires. Weybridge, where the Wellington bombers were built. One after another – a long list and every night a growing list. Then it was that men and women, too, worked through the night, worked through the day, and yet another night so that production might begin again. There was little opportunity for them to grieve over the dead. There was not much chance for the restoration of conditions in their homes where the windows had been blasted, the water supply cut off, and the sewage destroyed.

It was at this time that the Canadian Armies guarded the shores of Britain. But it is not of Canada that I would speak. Let others tell of the achievements, of the valiant deeds of the Dominion. For in birth, in upbringing, in education, in tradition, I am a Canadian, and it is as a Canadian that I now speak of the British people – that brave people – always foremost in the fight, ready to give the best that was in them.

Of the British effort in war, undertaken, let it be said, against my advice, for the protection of freedom, for the liberty of enslaved peoples, for the rescue of Jews imprisoned in ghettos, for the relief of Republicans and Democrats oppressed by Dictators – a war entered into by the British people so that freedom and liberty and justice might live there and here and in all the world.

This race who sacrificed manpower, comfort, wealth, and risked freedom and liberty, thus giving an example to humanity, have become the subject of criticism and abuse leveled at them by certain sections of opinion.

Two attacks in particular on the British people are constantly repeated in narrow and prejudiced circles in foreign countries. It is pretended that Britain is the oppressor of countless populations of black people and brown people. For that reason above any other, some foreigners condemn what they call British Imperialism. What are the facts?

The British have conferred upon the colored populations of the Empire the supreme benefit of the rule of Justice. The black men in Africa, the brown men in Malaya, all know that British justice is undefiled. And of all the principles of human liberty, the first principle must always be the certainty of justice. Where else can you find justice for black men? Where else can you depend upon law and order in human relations where race and color are an issue?

What is the second attack, which some unjust persons make upon the British? It relates of course to the Jews. Harsh, bitter, and false things are said even in the United States about British actions in Palestine. Faced by the violent activities of Jewish terrorists who learned too well the technique of their German oppressors, the British people have been forced to take stern measures. And on this account, shrill voices cry out that the British are tyrants who make war on all Jewry. What nonsense!

It is forgotten that it was Hitler and the Germans who attacked the Jews in Europe, who sacked the Ghettos and destroyed countless Jewish citizens in every country they invaded?

Is it forgotten that it was the British and the British Empire who first took up arms in defence of the Jews?

Is it forgotten that in those days The United States recognized to the furthest extent the struggle of the British Empire to resist persecution and to establish security and to sustain freedom?

Let it be remembered by those who mingle dispraise of Britain’s war effort with harsh criticism of her present policies that but for Britain’s stand in 1940, the Jewish populations of London, Leeds, and Manchester would have suffered the same fate as the wretched inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Maybe it is natural that some persons in the States should be critical of the British Empire. Certainly the vast majority of the citizens of the American Republic think differently and act differently, for they are a kindly and generous people.

But you are Canadians. You have borne a share, a full and more than a full part in the struggle of the Empire. It is right that you should ponder on the truth and that you should make it known.

As a Canadian, you have had bestowed upon you all the benefits and advantages of the atmosphere of optimism in which Canadians are brought up. You have before you the certainty of equal opportunity. No class prejudices bar your way.

But all these educational opportunities impose upon you a duty, and it is this: You should join in the leadership of the Empire to which you belong – a leadership which will insure for Britain and the British people the opportunity for reconstruction. It is the same measure of justice and the same opportunity which Britain conferred on our own country of Canada over the last century.

I should indeed be remiss in my duties were I not to address His Lordship, the Right Honorable Lord Beaverbrook, on behalf of the graduating class, and to welcome him as our Chancellor. No one of us could say well enough how proud we are that you have assumed this post. The pleasurable task has fallen to me to express the deep admiration and warm affection which the graduating class, one and all, hold for you.

On this happy day, we take this opportunity to welcome you again on your return to your native province, and to the institution which bears its name. We are fully aware that this University, in the long years of its history, has had no greater friend nor champion. We know that this day signals for all of us the continued vitality of the university’s contribution to this province, its citizens, and to this land of ours.

Again, I am sure the graduating class would wish me to welcome the alumni and alumnae who have returned on this memorable occasion. Your example of devotion and allegiance, your enthusiasm which has been so apparent, is an inspiration to the class of ’47, so that, on this day, we can do no less than pledge our continued and eager interest by maintaining an active association as members of your distinguished ranks.

One more word on behalf of my classmates and myself. On another occasion, we expressed as well as we could our gratitude to the members of the faculty. There is another association we shall always cherish. In this trying year, no one has contributed more of his energy to our cause. By his example of devotion to this university, by his courageous leadership, and his sympathetic understanding of our problems, he has captured the spirit of these times. We pray for his continued strength, so that the students of UNB may continue to find inspiration by his vigorous example. I refer, of course, to Dr. Milton F. Gregg.

Although I am sure the preceding words could be represented as the unanimous voice of the graduating class, I am not at all sure I should seek to extend that privilege. One learns quite early in life, or at least one should, the extreme hazard of voicing an opinion on behalf of others. And so, I am afraid I must strike out alone, but with the hope that the valedictorian’s words, if not endorsed by my classmates, might at least bear an occasional resemblance to their feelings.

When the graduating class wake from their slumbers tomorrow morning, or perhaps later in the day, we shall find ourselves in a world from which we are temporarily estranged. For a while at least, our participation in search of our own destiny will be in a state of suspension. Perhaps all of us shall feel a temporary loneliness, engendered by the realization that the pleasant years of university life are immediately behind us. A realization that the future holds a kind of uncertainty the like of which the world has never known.

That, I suppose, is a dramatic statement. If not, then it might be considered a cliché of all valedictorians. But let me attempt to amplify this observation.

To begin with, our life here has been perhaps as free an existence as we can ever hope to enjoy. We have been free to sample the great philosophies; we have been free to experiment with our own; we have been free to make the most glaring errors of judgment. And we have been free enough to enjoy leisure, free enough to indulge in carelessness.

But tomorrow, by the subtle and insidious processes of modern society, we can no longer enjoy such freedom. We must, to some extent, bow before the two great tyrants of our age- Conformity and Mechanization.

In a thoroughly mechanized society, we stand to be manufactured in the image of the machine. We stand to lose our finest sensibilities, to see them as shavings heaped upon the floor.

In a society so lavishly proud of its techniques in mass production, we ourselves have made a fetish of mass conformity. The independent and inquisitive mind finds itself compressed, confined, bounded on all sides by the eight hour day and the double feature at the cinema house; made insensate by the appalling sterility of our modern culture, with all its juke-box garishness, its mechanical gadgets, its previous utility, its digest magazines, its neon nightmares. For a few pennies, or by a flick of the wrist, we may learn all the news considered fit to print; and commentators are provided to render its meaning, and we are told of its further consequences by the prophets who garnish the editorial pages.

I wonder what kind of people we shall become if we continue to live in a world where we are urged to lubricate ourselves for our continued efficiency, as we lubricate our machines. I wonder how much we are influenced by the suggestion that by drinking a certain brand of liquor we can become men of distinction. And I wonder if it is possible to be reprimanded by a child, with horror showing on its face, because we brush our teeth without massaging our gums. Even the rather refreshing humor once found in the comic strips has disappeared. The other day, I found in the comic-strips, one corpse, another corpse pending, a petty theft, a bribery under way, and, by my count, eight guns, one sword, and a vicious hatpin …this seems to be indicative of our recent humorous bent.

I say that good naturedly; but it is somehow an ominous sign. If these are the kind of things which can be considered as having an influence upon our minds, how terribly easy it would be to influence us in more complex and critical matters.

It may be flattering for you and me to know that we are being fought over. The battle ground is in our minds. During the lull in lethal warfare, another battle goes on- it is a battle for our minds. This kind of warfare know no truce. It know no discrimination. It does not necessarily combat truth nor justice nor values nor ideologies.

What it does do so appallingly well is completely obscure truth, to dislocate us from our true nature and the fundamental integrity of human relations.

The casualties in this war for man’s mind are not buried beneath the earth, they are leveled to a kind of existence which the sensitive and creative mind finds intolerable. Our civilized world, the streets of our cities and towns, are littered with the casualties. So-called free men bound together by the chains of conformity, marching in a tragic lock-step, forced into the mart of mass production, to become mere spare parts or worse, the packaged goods from the assembly lines.

Sadly enough, all this is not as unpleasant as are the ultimate consequences. The musical accompaniment is in three-quarter time, with muted trumpets and tenor saxophones. Along the way, we have the byproducts of our drudgery- motor cars, frigidaires, pressure cookers, chewing gum. There have been more recent renovations- more money and less labor, more leisure to enjoy the emptiness which our labor and money provide. Science has given us a longer life, and some freedom from physical pain; but it has fashioned at the same time a startling and efficient weapon for our wholesale extermination.

Whatever dreams we may entertain of our future achievements, we know with a reasonable certainty that most of us are committed to similar destinies. This degree we hold is a symbol of our possession of what is commonly called a college education. By and large, it precludes our temperamental unsuitability for common labor. But we are also aware that fame and fortune wait upon the very few-dependent upon a kind of genius most of us lack, and a kind of luck few of us enjoy. Our material and social future is roughly pre-determined-not for the individual, but statistically, for the majority.

Outside our door on the morrow, stand the agents for Better Worlds and Better Tomorrows. If we examine their products closely, I think you will agree that the kind of Better Tomorrow most of these panacea-peddlers have in mind is based upon the exchange of one kind of materialism for another. If we examine their handsome theories critically, we shall come to find that they have roots in a narrow prejudice. I hope you understand I am not talking in a political sense,-not entirely. I merely say that our society is so enmeshed in the gears of its gargantuan machinery, even the prophets of the avant-garde have nothing to offer save pecuniary redemption, or material salvation.

What they would have us do is believe that the ideal that all men are created equal is a fallacy, but they propose, in effect, another fallacy- that all men may be created equal by parliamentary legislation. Politically we are being tempted to adhere to a dictatorship of standardization mediocrity.

I do not propose to evaluate the many shades of political ideology abroad today: I suppose my conclusions would be like any other’s- in keeping with personal prejudices and personal judgments. But you will agree with me when I say that in the development of a people’s government in a democratic society, our forefathers made a remarkable beginning. But our trouble. But our trouble seems to be that we are dangerously prolonging our fervent admiration of their handiwork, and we are reluctant to put into action a few blunt urgencies that a changing world has thrust upon us.

Our abnormal fear of the political “isms” has given us a paralyzed conscience. No government can serve if its motives are stimulated by Fear; if it sacrifices foresight and initiative for the sake of what might be called political self-righteousness.

Our education here is complete, but the world will not stand still long enough for us to practice what little we have learned. A university, like all other institutions, must keep pace with the kind of flux we call progress if it is to survive. The distinguished philosopher Alfred Whitehead has remarked that “for each succeeding generation, the problem of education is new.” He confesses cheerfully I think, that every single generalization respecting mathematical physics taught him at Cambridge has since been abandoned. It is true of all science, and they are to be commended for such a courageous admission. It is similarly true of the humanities, and they are beginning to show a little courage. It can be said without disparaging our triumph today that nothing depreciates so quickly as does this degree we now hold.

For a moment I should like to digress again. I read in Hansard recently- and I confess the habit of reading Hansard- it is sometimes dull but not altogether unenlightening- a speech made by a worthy member of parliament. I should like to mention two of his statements. This honorable gentleman was advising policy of economy. He had two suggestions which would lighten the taxpayer’s load. First, he would dispense with the National Film Board, which he likened to a hungry white elephant. Secondly, he would dispose of our overseas broadcasting facilities on the Atlantic Coast, which he considered an example of trying to keep up with the Joneses.

But the classic grievance he cited, which brought him to this thriftful conclusion was that the price of alarm clocks was too high. And that, I think is a splendid example. I could not have invented a better one. We should sacrifice the National Film Board and our overseas programs for a cheaper alarm clock.

Now let us arrive at the core of my contention. If you agree with my diagnosis, you will perhaps agree with the prescription.

I can make this generalization with assurance; there has never been a time in the history of our university when it was faced with so great a challenge or so great a temptation. In this era of free education, so long as it lasts, the institutions of higher learning have the opportunity they have cried for so long. Philosophic educators consider the centers of higher learning as the logical touchstone for a nation’s culture, for a nation’s progress, and well being..

Let us consider that in light of this University and this Province. I will be frank, because there is little use in being otherwise, and I consider this an opportunity to unburden a few grievances, not against our Alma Mater, but against ourselves. Surely we realize the necessity of a cultural renaissance. If I were asked to answer the startled query now so frequently raised, as to why so many of our most promising young men are leaving this country for that nation to the south, my reason would be that one might as well live in the land where the way of life is original than remain in the land where it is , like the June bride, made up of something borrowed, and something blue. We have within our borders the seeds of our own greatness.

In a province where nearly half our population speak French, our university has as its language requirement one year of Latin. I suggest we render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s and render unto Canada those things which are distinctly her own. Truly, we can never be Canadian citizens so long as we are unable to enjoy social intercourse with nearly half of our Canadian family.

Furthermore, and this is obvious, nothing would be of more benefit to this university than would three hundred co-eds. A co-educational university makes a unique contribution to its students. The qualities of social poise, gentility, and manliness are vital necessities, and these qualities are the natural result of a campus society where men and women meet together in common endeavor, mutual respect and similar numbers.

And finally the university must meet the challenge of youth , and it must prepare its undergraduates for the awful challenge of the future.

Let me come to it directly. All our wealth of natural resources, all our great traditions and our limitless material potential are to no avail, unless we inhabit this land with men and women keenly aware of their own wealth of resources, young men and women cognizant of their own potential.

The key to our solution is in the continued expansion of the liberal arts, the humanities, the world of letters. This does not ignore the faculties of Science and applied science, but it is a plea for the faculty of Arts.

If we are to preserve our identity, retain some semblance of human dignity, in this cluttered world of chrome and silver-plated gadgets, we must return to something like that concept of education we abandoned in the era of Henry Ford’s first motor-car. Surely the Arts faculty has learned its lesson from the past. It can no longer devote its time to developing its students into what John Dewey proclaimed as “little coteries of emancipated souls.” It must renounce its previous snobbery and become once more an agent of humanity.

The liberal Arts must be the fountainhead of our culture. A professor of the Arts faculty told his class at the beginning of the year: “This course will not put a nickel in your pockets; it will never serve as a reference for a job”. I think it has come to pass that this university will ever resist sending its graduates from this campus economically secure but culturally bankrupt.

Tomorrow we do battle with the tyrants. If we are truly worthy of this degree we hold, we will continue our pursuit of truth, we will preserve our spiritual identity, we will master the machinery that has threatened to enslave us.

This is the best of possible worlds for us today. It is far from being the best of conceivable worlds. We can only contribute to that distant end by remaining free, enlightened individuals.

Should we fall, we forfeit this degree- this symbol of our sovereignty. We shall not fail so long as we covet the memory of this day, so long as we maintain the impetus we have gained in our years here.

The invitation of the Alumni Society to speak for its members at this Encoenia has done me marked honor and brought me keen pleasure. To be given the pleasure of addressing a University audience and in New Brunswick is both a gratifying expression of the confidence of my brothers Alumni and an appeal to two of my chief interests in life. Had they gone but a step farther and assigned me a subject, and made that scientific, I would have felt in perfect sympathy with this occasion. But they, whether wisely or not you will soon be able to judge, have left the subject to me, and I have thought it best to leave Science to speak for herself, which at this day she is doing in a voice which none can fail to hear or find excuse to mistake, and to try to set before you the principal phases of a subject with which I am thrown not a little into contact, and which is at one and the same time apt to the activities of an Alumni Society, near to the interests of this audience, and important to the progress of this Province. My subject is—Present Tendencies in Higher Education.

What is education? Why do we want it? Though so old and often asked these questions are yet new and unanswered, and it is true that there is no subject of equal public importance which is so little understood by those whom it most concerns. All admit its value in the abstract, but there is still in the public mind the greatest confusion between the natures of education, knowledge, information, and technical or professional training, and between the functions of the common school, the college, the technical or professional school and the University. Yet in a democracy public opinion must be instructed on these questions and give its approval before progress is possible, and a chief duty of every educational leader in America to-day is the demonstration to the public of the true nature and requirements of education. Education is not a natural quality of man; there is a constant tendency to relapse from it which only eternal vigilance can prevent, while for its advancement extra-ordinary efforts are demanded. Merely to keep what has been gained, requires the careful instruction of each new generation and constant reminder to the old, while progress claims as its price never ceasing observation, experiment and discussion, here a fact demonstrated, there a principle gained, slow, painful, but precious advance. These are the reasons why the question what is education, can never grow old.

The true basis of education seems to be this. Man is an animal whose weak and weaponless body is inferior to that of many of the brutes, but who has risen to domination over them, and much more of nature, through the possession of one supreme characteristic,—mind. Mind has been his reliance in the struggle for existence, and the sharpness of that struggle has forced him to develope it highly. Mind has enabled him to use tools, to adapt himself by their aid to conditions under which in a state of nature he could not live, and to divide labor and specialize it extremely in particular lines. To make best use of mind he has had to develope some very un-brute-like characteristics, such as care for the neighbor, subordination of present pleasure to future good, and other characteristics which we call moral. Now education is simply the deliberate attempt to direct this process, to enable man, the animal, to utilize to its fullest value his great weapon, Mind; it is the dynamical factor in the rapid and certain adaptation to the condition of his environment. Viewed broadly there are in this adaptation, that is in Education, four leading elements. First: There is the awakening of the faculties and training in the knowledge which men use in common in the daily affairs of life, and the cultivation of the qualities which subordinate the individual animal to the social man. Second: There is the training of the individual to the highest possible degree in some particular line of useful activity that he may make the best living for himself and the better perform his part of the divided labor of the community. Third: There is the exhaustive training of all the faculties of the mind up to the highest point of working efficiency in order to put the mind as a whole in a condition to utilize all its potentialities. Fourth: There is with this training as a basis the utilization of mind in new activities and the winning of new knowledge. Practically these four elements have been recognized by educators, and four distinct kinds of institutions have grown up in response to them, which we call respectively the school, the technical or professional school, the college and the university. This is a description of man, the educated animal. It is pleasant to look for a moment on the flower of it all, the educated man. What is he? He is one who highly trained in, and intensely devoted to the principles and practice of a useful business or profession; with this has culture. Culture consists not alone in wide knowledge but in wider sympathy, not so much in stores of facts, as in ability to transmute facts into knowledge, not only in well-grounded conviction but in toleration, not only in absorption of wisdom, but in its radiation, in patriotism without Provincialism, in force controlled by character. How often has all this been said before and will be said again in words that vary but in thought the same. Perhaps it is not being said better than by the great advocate and illustrious example of culture, Huxley. This is his educated man, "That man I think has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready like a steam engine to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operation; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience, who has learned to love all beauty whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness and to respect others as himself."

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After this it will seem strange to you when I say that another great tendency in Education is towards individualism, but there is here no paradox. There is a popular impression that an educational system is best managed after the fashion of an army, with an analogous system of grades, and of drill which shall bring all of the ultimate units, private soldiers or students up to a certain high identical standard. This is believed at all events for the lower grades. No doubt this comparison holds also the explanation; armies are more familiar to most people than educational systems, and they naturally enough apply the test of one to the other. But there is of course not the slightest resemblance between the aims and methods of the two, for all soldiers are to be trained to one and the same very specialized function, while students are to be trained to all of the very different functions requisite to a highly differential community; in the one case individuality is to be suppressed for the smoother working of a great machine, in the other it is to be developed for the more profitable division of labor.

* * * * * *

The investigation method is the only natural one. It is that by which the race has gained its knowledge, and by which individuals climb to the greatest heights in education it is best used by placing each new thing before the student as a problem, arranged to come just within the compass of his powers, his natural interest and pleasure in the exercise of power is thus called into operation. Success is made to depend entirely upon the accuracy of his own observation and reasoning, and he is encouraged to aid and test the latter by experiment. Thus is self-reliance cultivated and confidence in his own power of independent accomplishments and desire for new problems to conquer, and the study-bogie ceases to trouble, and the meaningless recitation is laid to rest. And here I beg to call your attention to the fact that this investigation method is precisely that which is used by men of business, statesmen, inventors, and everybody else who does anything worth while in the world, and it is a remarkable demonstration of the backwardness of at least primary education that this natural and universal method is hailed in education as new, and it also helps to explain how so many men of the past have succeeded so brilliantly without education. They had the clearness of sight to see and use a method superior to that which education could give them. The self-made man has no doubt often been letter made than if so called education had had much to do with the process.

The introduction of this spirit gives the teacher a new relation to teaching. The older system with its refinement of methods has a tendency to shift the responsibility of learning off from the pupil over upon the teacher, and the more the teacher drives and drills, the more does the pupil think that his duty ends with a faithful and blind obedience to the teacher's requirements. The resultant state of affairs is that a chief part of the teacher's duty is aggressive campaigning against unwilling students, and in public estimation, the teacher who can best drive his pupils to learn, is only surpassed by him who can beguile them to learning against their will. But the natural method changes this. The teacher becomes a leader, he provides the pupil with opportunities to learn, but throws the responsibility upon him. He acts as adviser and friend and sets an example. It is astonishing how little the value of example in education is valued. The superiority of example over precept is admitted in everything else, but it is usually considered not in the least necessary that teachers should show any of the attributes of students, or do any studying beyond that necessary to refresh the memory for the daily lesson, and most institutions keep the teacher so overloaded with a teaching drudgery that no time nor strength is left for anything else. The Universities long ago recognized the value of investigation methods and realized that it was only he, who is himself an investigator, who can use investigation methods. He only understands that alert spirit of concentrated observation and reasoning which is essential to intellectual progress, and the best of them now seek only men of University training and expect them to apply University spirit; and of course with modifications it is even reaching the schools. The ideal teacher of the future will, I think, be one of carefully selected material, who has been fully educated by natural methods, and who, held in authority only so far as is necessary to the unity of the system under which he is working, will be left entirely free as to his methods, and judged only by his results. This ideal is now realized in many University and college teachers.

* * * * * *

Another tendency, the last I shall speak of, is towards the differentiation of educational institutions into these four, the school, the college, the technical or professional school, and the university. Earlier I have given you reasons for believing that this division is not arbitrary nor only for convenience, but is grounded adaptively in the very nature of the educational problem. These institutions must work in harmony, and hence work best under one management, but the aims and hence the tools and methods of colleges and technical schools are so different that to attempt to combine two of them, or to graft one upon the other means disaster to both. Yet this is precisely what the public so often demands and I am confident that a chief cause of the discontent in this province towards this university, is on one hand due to the failure on the part of the critics to recognize that a college and a professional school are too different to be combined, and on the other, to the failure of the university to make the distinction plain by refusing to dally with things which belong to the technical school and by its neglect to constantly set forth and illustrate its proper place in the educational and social life of the province.

It is not necessary to remind this audience of the place in education of the school, for nowhere, I suppose, is the school better understood or more valued than in New Brunswick. We are all agreed that it is the proper training place for the citizens of a civilized community, and since most of them never get beyond it, it should be made as perfect as possible for them. There seems to me need for better teaching in the lower grades; there the pupil's attitude towards study is chiefly formed, and likes and dislikes developed which powerfully influence his future. We all know that a wrong start in a subject can hardly ever be compensated, and that many a case of supposed inability to learn a difficult subject like mathematics is traceable to an unconsciously hostile attitude towards it, the result of un-sympathetic early teaching. To teach lower grades demands a less knowledge of fact than to teach the higher, but requires more wisdom, and lower grade teachers should be as thoroughly educated and well paid as high school teachers.

* * * * * *

A question of prominence at present in the greater colleges is that of entrance requirements and the adjustment of school to college. The movement is markedly towards fewer subjects, a certain amount of selection, and better quality. It is astonishing how little the entrance examinations have changed since the middle ages. The classic mathematics and a little history, mostly ancient, are still the standards, with one modern language added. In the meantime there has arisen through the spread of democracy a necessity for training in citizenship. Moreover there has arisen a series of interests which are engrossing the attention of the world to an extent that none of the other subjects have ever gone, namely, the natural sciences. And yet few colleges require any of these for entrance, but only the old subjects as if the world were not moving. I consider it simply barbarous that so many colleges in these days should require of eighteen year old pupils a knowledge of three languages in addition to their own, some mathematics, a little history, but no training for citizenship and no science. It is no wonder that college teachers complain that children are stuffed, not educated, that they do not know how to speak properly; that their preparation in English is miserable. It is no wonder that so many intelligent people outside of the college complain that higher education is unpractical and contributes more to pedantry and dilettanteism than to the qualities which make useful men. It is no answer to say that these subjects should be taken up in college, and not in the schools, for as most persons never go to college, that is equivalent to claiming that only college men and women should be permitted to know the things necessary to intelligent exercise of citizenship and to clear understanding of the progress of the modern world, which is a reductio ad absurdum indeed. The ideal system to aim for the present seems to me to be this, to require for admission—first, thorough training in English; second, a modern language, German or French; third, a classical language; fourth, the elements of mathematics; fifth, modern history and geography, with elements of political economy; sixth, one of the natural sciences.

This condemnation of present entrance requirements is not my own but is wide-spread. The Commission of New England Colleges has been for some years at work upon it and the Faculty of Harvard College has recently taken up the entire subject and something will come out of their discussion of it. A system, the college, like the university, has its ideal, the seeking of absolute truth. Before this all artificial lines of doctrines and sects go down, most of the greater institutions started as denominational colleges, but they are far away from that now. The denominational college is most useful in a new and poor community; support can be obtained for it from people who could not be induced to give to an institution unless at the same time they feel they are giving to their church: and they will send their sons to such a college when they would not to one that is undenominational, for of these there is always more or less of suspicion among people who are afraid of possible jars to the foundation of their faith. But with increasing knowledge this disappears, and colleges tend to become undenominationalized. That in these provinces the denominational colleges predominate so largely shows that we are still in a stage which some communities have long since passed beyond.

* * * * * *

In summary, the points I have tried to make plain to you are these: Education is not up to the needs of the age but is advancing. It cannot be judged in its methods by utilitarian standards. The greatest advances are occurring in the centers of wealth and population, and principles are being there deduced which all should study, and not copy, but adapt. The tendencies are at present towards training citizens rather than individuals, towards cultivating individuality; towards requiring teachers to be professionals; towards a natural and not a scholastic spirit in teaching and learning; towards optimum rather than maximum results; towards specialization as the basis of breadth; towards the larger use of the sciences; towards the differentiation of four kinds of educational institutions, of which the school and the college are indispensable in every community, the technical school vital to its material prosperity. Much of what I have said does not directly apply to this community at present but it is a great gain to have before us guiding principles.

Members of the Graduating Class:

I passed from this college thirteen years before you, and in that time I have noticed some things which may interest you. I have observed that it pays to cultivate character; that temperance is consistent with hard work; that the familiar saying, there is room at the top, is true; that the man who succeeds is not the one who does everything that is expected of him, but the one who does more; that plodding, concentrated industry makes more solid advance than brilliant spurting; that every step one takes should lead logically to another in the chosen path; that leaping beyond competitors is more satisfactory than pulling them back; that service of the community brings greater pleasure than service to self; that well-based independence of thought and action brings respect; that it pays to have the same the best. Another might tell you things in other words, but I am a specialist and must stick to my line. Every precept of religion that I know of is independently confirmed by science. Of all tendencies of the present day in education, in thought, in life, the greatest is towards this, the Unity of Truth.

Your Honor, Mr. President and Members of the Senate, Mr. Chancellor and Gentlemen of the Faculty, Fellow Students, Ladies and Gentlemen :—

One more year of college work is done. Once again the friends of the University of New Brunswick have met to celebrate her encaenial day. The members of another class - this time the class of 1897 - have received the reward of their labors from the hands of our honored Chancellor.

As the representative of that class on this occasion I must first speak our hearty welcome to all who have assembled here this afternoon to cheer us with their presence and to bid us “God Speed” on our entrance into that larger life which awaits us on the morrow.

The last day of a class within their college halls must ever be a day of sadness as well as pleasure. It is true that we may feel a pardonable pride in having added our names to the long list of graduates of old U.N.B., so many of whom have won honor for themselves and credit for their Alma Mater, but we sadly recollect that our days of glad companionship and happy friendship at the University of New Brunswick are at an end— “gone glimmering through the things that were.”

It seems to us but yesterday when nearly a score of eager and expectant young men and women ascended this hill for the first time and enrolled themselves on the University annals as the class of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Seven.

Time has dealt severely with our numbers since then. Of the eighteen who comprised the Freshman Class in ’93-’94, only four remain to receive their exeat in 1897. Others who entered from time to time increased the number of those who have owned allegiance to ’97 to twenty-three, and the number of those graduating to the modest but [weel-omened] number of seven.

We do not propose to detail the circumstances which have caused this large reduction in our ranks, but we must pause to record our sympathy with three of our number who were compelled to give up their studies with us on account of ill health. We have missed the cheer of their presence but our hearts have been gladdened with tidings of their recovery and we hope yet to see them honored graduates of the University of New Brunswick.

Except the large decrease in our numbers our class history has been very much the same as that of other classes in our University. The ill-advised presumption of the “novus homo” and the foolish wisdom of the sophomore were ours in the usual degree. At the beginning of the junior year we experienced the customary transition to the more grave and thoughtful side of college life. We discovered that education meant discipline, and that it required the chief part of our time and the very best of our effort. Our reading and our studies began to receive an ever increasing share of attention and especially were we interested in the welfare of the college societies.

In the last respect at least the class of ’97 feel that they have ever tried to do their duty to themselves and to their fellow students. We are glad for what we are able to do and are only sorry that we could not do more. We have every confidence that in the hands of ’98 the societies will continue to prosper. We will always be glad to hear of their success and can assure them than no pang of envy will be felt when we hear that they have succeeded in surpassing us in any or every particular.

We believe that a college is not a place for study merely, but for education in a broader sense - an education not for ornament but for use. The man who comes to college to do nothing but dig into books may succeed in gathering a large amount of information, just as a man who enters business solely to make money will generally succeed in getting rich, yet we feel that in the one case as in the other the motive is not the true one and that such a life is devoid of that power of influence which gives it its real title to existence and its real value in the world.

If such only were the benefits to be derived from a college education we could sympathize with those who doubt the value of a college education in this practical nineteenth century life. But this is not all of such college training, and the refutation of such a belief is the work of the college societies and the various recreative aspects of college life. Ask any man, who has taken an active interest in the student societies of his college, what of his whole course has done him most lasting benefit, and in the great majority of cases I venture to say he will give that credit to the contact of life with life and the consequent opportunities for true development afforded by the college societies.

The Young Men's Christian Association comes first in the list of our student organization. From being a few years ago one of the most precarious of our societies it is now perhaps the most active and efficiently organized of them all. The association has not only drawn our own students closer together but has given us a feeling of fellowship with the students of our sister colleges that many of us highly prize. Our association has been practically under the executive control of ’97 for two years and during that time has enjoyed a good measure of prosperity and the confidence and support of both students and faculty. Such an organization working as it does on the broadest religious basis is valuable in the highest degree to a State University such as ours.

Our debating society has hail one of the most successful years of its existence. The importance to a college of a well-conducted debating society can scarcely be over-estimated, it is to such a society that many of the most eminent public men of the day owe their power in speaking and in argument. We are sorry that some of the best students of the University have seemingly overlooked the importance of this society, even the enthusiasm of mock parliament being insufficient to secure their attendance on Saturday night. Such men are making the mistake of their life and the chances are that at some future time they may be willing to know a little less of the subjects of the curriculum if they could but clearly present their views in public when the occasion calls upon them to do so. Our special thanks are due to Prof. Davidson for his kind help and advice and the lively interest he has taken in the working of the society.

The University Monthly has issued from the press with more or less regularity as usual. The magazine is as useful in its way as any department of college work— to those who contribute articles to its columns rather than advice to its editors. Our best thanks are due to the many graduates who have come to our aid with a kind word, an interesting contribution or the ever welcome subscription.

Concerning the Athletic Association it is unnecessary for us to speak at length. Our football team was in the field as usual and although we were not able to claim a great number of victories, yet we felt amply repaid in the bracing effects due to the systematic training of the physical powers required for this manly and distinctively college game. This year has also seen the rise of hockey, which has supplied the long felt want of a good winter game.

Our annual field day while not particularly distinguished for record breaking as on some previous occasions was extremely interesting. The events were warmly contested and keenly enjoyed by a large number of spectators. Increased gymnasium facilities would be an inestimable boon to the association. An instructor is much needed if only for a portion of the year during the football season and preceding our annual field day.

The Glee Club under the energetic management of Prof. Stockley is a progressive organization and even those of us who do not particularly boast of our gift of song often feel that it is worth while to climb the hill once a week to take part in those inspiring choruses peculiar to college men.

Increased library privileges have been provided during the year. These improvements have been largely taken advantage of, as is well instanced, by the fact that nearly double the usual number of books were taken out for home reading during the year. Efforts are being made to equip the library with additional and more modern books. These efforts have been attended with a good degree of success. We hope that the final result will be to provide the University with a well filled library, fully equipped in all its departments.

Residency has been flourishing during the year at the old stand. While the prospects are not as encouraging as we would like to report, yet there does not seem to be that cause for discouragement that some friends of the scheme apparently feel. Residency, as most other things, will become more popular after it has received a favorable trial, and from the way in which the present residents speak we feel confident that the trial has been a success. The cost of residency to the already heavily encumbered funds of the University is an admittedly strong argument against it. The great need first of all is a new building. Let this be taken charge of by an association of all the resident students, who will appoint their own steward and assistant—perhaps from the students themselves paying them a small allowance for their services. The students can thus regulate their expenses to suit their own pleasure. Such associations, where tried, have worked well and all the conditions of successful working seem to be present with us.

But one change in the personnel of the faculty has occurred during our course. Dr. Bridges’ retirement from the chair of classics was universally regretted by the friends of the University and particularly by the students. Yet while we realize that the University has lost one of her tried teachers we know that she still retains the active support of one of her sincerest friends.

Dr. Bridges’, successor, Prof. Raymond, has discharged the duties of the chair during the year in an able and conscientious manner.

Through the liberality of Asa Dow, Esq., the University will be enabled to add another $1000 to the Scholarship fund. This further donation has but served to add to the words of praise with which his former munificence was received.

The will of the late H.G.C. Ketchem, C.E., provided for a silver medal for the department of Engineering. Such a donation, especially prized as the gift of one who was himself an eminent engineer will no doubt serve to increase the zeal of the students in that important department of the University.

We were glad a short time since to congratulate our energetic Professor of Philosophy on his taking his doctor’s degree in course at his Alma Mater, the University of Edinburgh.

The absence of Prof. Downing from the lecture room during the latter part of the term owing to serious illness was deeply regretted. We hope that the amiable professor may be speedily restored to health through the treatment he is undergoing at his home in Philadelphia.

A subject that has engaged the attention of my immediate predecessors, I will, with your kind permission, mention again. I refer to the subject of admission to the University. It cannot be denied that men are allowed to enter the University who are entirely unfit to do so, and that allowance will have to continue to be made for such students in the present state of our secondary education is equally certain. The trouble with us is not that the standard set for matriculation is not high enough, but that a student who has been conditioned in three or four subjects of the entrance examination is allowed to enter the Freshman class as a full-fledged undergraduate. Such a student attempts to rid himself of these conditions during the year in addition to his regular work. He fails in this, and not receiving the least credit for his year’s work, leaves college in disgust. Now it seems to us that we should either rigidly enforce our own entrance regulations, or adopt those of a great many other colleges where such a student would receive credit for any course successfully passed, so that practically any deficiencies in his preparation could be made up gradually throughout the entire four years. Now we do not say that this method is absolutely better than is ours when strictly carried out, but if at present we have neither the one system nor the other, and it must be admitted that their method is the one best calculated to induce that large attendance which a large portion of the public complacently accept as the sole test of a university’s efficiency. Of course a strict observance of the method at present in vogue with us will continue to appeal to those men who do not fear difficulties in a college course, but rather welcome them, but we ask again, is it expedient for the University to take this stand in the present circumstances?

In connection with this we would like to suggest a formal beginning of the college at the opening of the college year. At this opening, addresses could be made by members of the faculty, by the President of the Young Men's Christian Association, and by the Presidents of the other college societies. Such a meeting would tend to establish better mutual understanding all round besides having other advantages which will suggest themselves.

May we also put in a plea for more options in the subjects of the ordinary course. The only option at present allowed the ordinary student is that between Physics and Science in the Senior year. Outside of this he must address himself to the rigid lines of the course without being able to consult his own tastes and inclinations in the least. It would be quite difficult to point out a parallel case in any similar institution, and we feel that we are justified in asking that more opportunities for special reading and concentration of effort on subjects of the student’s own selection be allowed at least during the Senior year. If one half the whole number of subjects taught in this year—Classics counting two—were required, and an extended course in reading prescribed in each, would not the result be to make the course more popular and more advantageous to the student? To meet the argument against lowering the standard of graduation it might be advisable to restrict the privileges of the optional course to students who have given evidence of fitness for such a course during the work of the Junior year. Such an arrangement could in no way detract from the standard set for the University degree.

We hope, gentlemen, that these few suggestions will commend themselves to you for favorable consideration. They are not offered, we assure you, in any spirit of criticism or fault-finding, but from a sincere desire to forward the usefulness and prosperity of the noble institution that forms the crown of the educational system of New Brunswick—an institution for which the class of ’97 feels the very highest regard and esteem. We are proud of our Alma Mater and shall always be jealous of her truest welfare. As a slight indication of our interest, it is our purpose to contribute $35 during the present year towards providing a suitable foundation for the equatorial telescope in the observatory.

To you, gentlemen of the faculty, who have been “our guides, philosophers and friends” during the last four years we have only words of gratitude as we come to say farewell. We thank you for the pains you have taken to direct, for a short time, our footsteps in the pathway of knowledge. But we thank you above all for the personal interest you have taken in us, for the allowance you have always made for our faults and failures, for the readiness with which you have always listened to our requests and grievances; in every case we found you willing to aid us by your experience and advice. We shall always be glad to hear of your success in your University work, as we are assured that we shall have your good wishes in the work that may await us.

To you, our fellow students, we can add but little to what we have already said. Our relations with you have ever been of the most pleasant kind. We assure you that our thoughts will often wander back to the good old days at the U.N.B. with pleasant memories of the men we have met there and whose friendship we sincerely prize.

To the people of Fredericton we return our thanks for the many kindnesses shown us during our stay among you. Your beautiful city will always be remembered as a charmed spot in which we were privileged to spend four pleasant years of the spring time of youth.

And now the time has come to bid adieu to all the scenes of our pleasant life at the University of New Brunswick. To each of our friends the class of ’97 speaks a united farewell.

“Farewell—a word that must be, and hath
Been—
A sound that makes us linger ; yet—farewell.”

Citation: ENCAENIA, MAY, 1982
JAMES KENNETH CONRAD MULHERIN
to be Doctor of Science

As Dr. Johnson once said, "Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place." It is not in the character of James Kenneth Conrad Mulherin to boast about his exploits, but we hope that he takes some pride in being here today, just as we take pride in honouring him.

Born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, Connie Mulherin came to the University of New Brunswick to study forestry, but switched to engineering in his second year, and graduated with a B.Sc. degree in 1945. The yearbook for that year tells us that he was Vice-President of the Newman Club, President of the Bowling Club, Captain of the '45 interclass hockey team, and was in the ranks of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps. His contemporaries remember him as a popular, likeable, even-tempered, efficient, modest person, but, unfortunately for orators who write citations, no youthful scandals or misdeeds appear to darken his university days. Perhaps the self-discipline which he has shown after leaving university does not entirely stem from his training in the Officers' Training Corps, nor from his subsequent service in the Royal Canadian Engineers, because I understand that he lived in a boarding house in Fredericton run by an iron-handed landlady. If breakfast was at 7:30 a.m. and he arrived at 7:31, he didn't get any.

After his brief service in the Canadian army, Mr. Mulherin joined Montreal Engineering which, at that time, was developing its business in Latin America. With that abundant foresight for which he is well-known, he went out and bought a tropical suit, only to find that he was immediately posted to Yellowknife.

For five years he was Field Engineer for various hydro-electric projects in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, Alberta and Labrador. He then returned to Montreal where he made steady and spectacular progress -- Supervising Engineer, Chief Construction Engineer, Manager General Engineering Division, Vice-President and General Manager, and, in 1974, President and General Manager of Montreal Engineering, and President and Chief Executive Officer of Monenco Limited, which includes forty engineering companies and supervises the construction of hydro-electric and thermal power projects in various parts of the world, including Canada, South and Central America, the West Indies, India and Sri Lanka. In 1980 he received the Julian Smith award for outstanding achievement in Canadian development.

If one were to list Mr. Mulherin's professional memberships, his presidencies, his chairmanships, his directorships, one might be tempted to cry, with Macbeth, "What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?" and I am sure that he himself would not wish it.

Outgoing and friendly, Connie Mulherin o'er steps "not the modesty of nature," and few people realize the amount of time and money which he has put into worthy causes and civic affairs.

It would have been helpful to an orator if he could have said, with Hamlet, "'tis sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petar," but Mr. Mulherin is too skillful an engineer for that. We honour him today for that skill, for what he has done for his profession and his country, and assure him that he does appear considerable in his native university.

Your Honour (bow), Madame Chancellor (bow), Chairman and members of the Board of Governors, members of the Senate and faculty, ladies and gentlemen and fellow graduates.

I remember well the 13th of May, 37 years ago when I climbed the steps to the stage of Memorial Hall to get my degree in civil engineering. Like many of my classmates, I was already a member of Canada's armed forces looking forward to fighting the imperial army of Japan.

I have to confess, however, what I don't remember about that day was the name of the old fellow who gave the address to the graduating class -- nor do I remember what he said. I hope when one of you is up here, 37 years from today, you won't say the same thing about me.

When Dr. Downey telephoned to advise me of the great honour the university proposed to bestow upon me, and suggested I make this address to you, I immediately had to give some consideration to what I would say. It seems very appropriate that one of my classmates is also getting an honorary degree today, and Betty Brewster probably represents the opposite pole to me in both the education we received and in the careers we have followed. It is a fact that our educational system then, and probably now, has created the two cultures in which we both operate, and upon which I'd like to make some remarks today. I also want to talk about quality and fun.

The Two Cultures

For an occasion such as this, finding the right things to say which are beyond the common place is a perilous exercise. Because I am an engineer and a business man, I don't have a profound message, but I do have some thoughts and convictions that I would like to share. Understanding the environment in which we live is an important aspect in managing our private as well as our business affairs. For people like me, the most simple and yet most exacting criterion remains the bottom line -- the profit.

To achieve the best results, we have to have excellence and efficiency. But it is also necessary to try to understand the significance of our business in the world and in the Canadian society in our times and in history.

Engineering and technology in ancient civilizations, and in our own, since the middle ages, have been at the centre of man's progress and, at the same time, at the centre of social controversy. Intellectuals, literary and philosophic types have often ignored or derided the manual and technical work of engineers.

Plato noted the contempt of the philosopher for the engineer; "it is so true", said he to the philosopher, "that you despise the engineer and his art, and sneeringly call him a mechanic and that you would not give your daughter in marriage to his son or marry your son to his daughter".

The reputation of engineers has improved since Plato's time. But in our western civilization, two education systems, one teaching the mechanical arts and the other the liberal arts, still tend to form the two kinds of people that C.P. Snow called the "two cultures". Much of the conflict in our modern society originates from what some consider to be the contradiction between technical and human values in the two cultures. They tend to think of them as mutually exclusive. However, through history these two cultures have proven to be essential to the survival and progress of man. Demands for zero growth, no nuclear power, small and beautiful, soft energies, the biosphere, environmental protection and its proliferation of bureaucratic controls, are all reactions to the imperfections of technological and industrial development. But if we over react, we also discredit the rational and technical approach to human problems. At the same time, some societies with already high levels of affluence, and others with a desperate need to improve their standard of living, are insisting on evolving rapidly. They are generally dispirited with their systems of government, and are often without consensus - all of which, in sum, is fertile ground to bring progress to a screeching halt.

In spite of this negative description of our moment in time, I have much faith in the future, in you, and in all men and women who will, as in times past, use their strength and values to move on to great achievements.

The future is always uncertain -- it is the real frontier, and I suggest that there are no magical formulas to conquer it and no point in giving up in anguish. However, in historical perspectives, most problems have a sense of "deja vu". So I suppose that basics are always in order.

In the course of 37 years of professional activity in engineering and construction of resource development projects, I have noticed a few basic requirements which seem to become more and more relevant to the solution of the problems of our times, and which I believe apply to all professions and disciplines. They can be grouped in two categories; first, the achievement of high standards of quality in what we do and, second, the fun and enjoyment of working with others.

The Achievement of High Standards of Quality in Professional Activity

New Brunswick has a proud heritage of individuals who have made major contributions to our Canadian development. I hope you will forgive a personal reference - seventy-five years ago, men from New Brunswick, led by Lord Beaverbrook (the Beaver) who is recalled here today by the presence of our new chancellor, founded what has now become the Monenco group of companies, which I have the honour to serve. Today, our staff of over 5,000 is actively pursuing their professions in Canada and around the world. The University of New Brunswick, which owes so much to these same men, in both of the two cultures, provided a group of key staff who, with others, took on the company and saw it through a tremendous period of growth, with lasting monuments to its efforts in resource development all around the world.

The achievement of quality and excellence is nothing new, but I'm not sure if it's improving nowadays, given that the Japanese have taken over our car market. but I'm damn sure we must continue to improve in the increasing complexity of the technical and social problems we are and will be facing. I urge you to seek to deepen your knowledge in your chosen area and move with determination to apply it to increasingly demanding practical situations. You owe this much to yourselves and to society. Go as far as you can. Only then will the rewards be sweet. You should also seek to understand the context of your work and its interface with the work of others. Not only will this help you to avoid job pitfalls, but it will help you understand that the technical, social and political are closely related. Try to understand the processes in which you are involved. In engineering, we talk about the systems approach, which means defining inputs, processes and outputs. This is basic to all activities and fundamental to life in organized societies. And please remember, we learn much more from our mistakes than from our successes.

Many of mankind's most important developments have resulted from the pressure of dealing with situations where things were going badly. It may be that we only find the extra resources of human ingenuity and insight when our backs are to the wall.

The Fun of Working in Teams

Not only are disciplines interrelated, but the achievement of any major task requires great numbers of people. All of you will be working with others, so it may as well be fun. When a group of us, who graduated from UNB in the late forties and early fifties, started with the company where most of us are still employed today, we probably viewed "fun" and "work" as being two separate activities. However, we soon discovered that because our work was done with congenial and compatible team mates, it became so captivating that we have been described as being almost monastic in our dedication to our tasks.

What do I mean by "fun"? I don't limit it to the humour and laughter which are the spice of any human activity – it includes the satisfaction of sharing with others the effort of one's work and responsibilities, and the pleasure of seeing the fruits of one's labours.

It is difficult to describe the exhilaration I felt when, after months of enduring life in tents in temperatures of -50°c and many battles with mosquitoes and black flies, I finally saw a river diverted into a channel made by man from one that glaciers had created eons before, a diversion that would permit the construction of a dam to provide electricity and heat to a community in Canada's north, and supply power to operate mines that were developing Canada's resources for the world to use.

I believe many of the limits to performance are imposed by our inability to achieve the kind of interpersonal relationships which are essential to achievement. football teams, as well as orchestras, need harmony for success. If we are to achieve competitive success or, as they say, "to make beautiful music" in our professional careers, we have to understand the processes of communications, of goal-setting, of learning from others and sharing experiences, rather than trying to work in isolation. Even the most skilled researcher, although apparently working alone, measures his success on what he has been able to add to the findings of his colleagues and predecessors. This is not to downplay the importance of leadership, but to emphasize that the leaders of tomorrow will need this ability to create, coach and direct teams.

The Coming Years

We all have our individual conception of the meaning of existence, but we are all involved in the same basic activity: the satisfaction of our human needs and those of others. That's the story of humanity, and it's fascinating. The challenges are the same as before, but the scope of the problems, their intensity, their pace and their complexity are all increasing. I believe the means of resolving our problems have been, or will be, discovered by man along the way. Food, shelter and energy are some of these basic needs. But there are many others which affect the quality of life and which respond to the urge to achieve greater heights--to reach new frontiers.

In practical terms, all of this translates into opportunities to participate and to contribute. Our grouping of human beings on this part of the planet earth, called Canada, are particularly fortunate. I can almost hear some of you muttering: "here come the platitudes about how fortunate we are and how the future belongs to Canada". Sure we're fortunate to be here, but the right to take advantage of that opportunity has to be earned by thoughtful hard work. From my perspective, I am convinced there are more opportunities waiting to be seized than at any period in our history.

37 years ago I, and others from this university, had no idea how our lives and careers would evolve and how we would grow with our country through our engineering and organizational skills. We, in our group, did it on the opportunities created by the country's resource development, and by exporting our acquired skills in world markets.

Looking at the effort needed to pursue the development of Canada, I still find myself, as I was 37 years ago, excited by the challenge and the competition, but awed by the magnitude of the task which, more than ever, requires the many skills and dedication of so many people. people who will do their best and have fun doing it. the scale of the potential for the development of Canada remains truly enormous. There are many things to be done by Canadians and if we continue to build on our acquired experience, every generation will benefit from the one before.

To conclude, I must repeat, I am confident that among you and your generation, there are many who, on their own or within enterprises, will make such things possible and will develop fully their scholarly, creative or entrepreneurial talents. Canada has a crying need for the driving force of people motivated from within, who still believe individuals are not insignificant, and can, with others, create private wealth-generating enterprises for an improved quality of life.

I hope you enjoy yourselves in your chosen professions. Have a useful life - don't foul it up -- success and satisfaction are so much more fun!

In preparing for this speech I read a paper on public speaking but, you know, it didn’t help me come up with a good beginning at all, so, I’ve decided to open with a quote.

Cesare Pavese, an Italian writer, said, “The only joy in the world is to begin!”

Short, sweet, and very important to keep in mind as we leave our university lives and begin in the real world.

So here we are, graduating from UNB, some of us going to work and others continuing their education, but we are all beginning a new chapter in life. I am sure we all have mixed feelings at this time. Isn’t it ironic that this is a happy and a sad occasion, as well as a beginning and an end.

So many of us came to UNB as strangers to each other, and the sad thing is that someday we may be strangers again. But we met, we talked, we laughed, and we sang and we learned together for a time. And every ounce of hard work was made up for by the time we shared together and the insights and understanding that came our way.

With all those good times in mind, how can I say “the only joy in the world is to begin?”

But, if we look realistically at our lives, and ourselves, we have grown a great deal in our short time at UNB and I know we are ready to begin a new chapter.

Pleasant and enriching though it has been we can’t stay here forever. We wouldn’t continue that growing process that we are working on every-time we begin something new.

I guess what I am trying to say is that we are all working for our future. If we live with the thought that “the only joy in the world is to begin,” then we will never be afraid to begin something new and we will continually be developing our potential and contributing to our future. It is important to be concerned with the future, after all, we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

One of my professors once said, in class, that we didn’t get educated at university. Well, I disagreed. I understood that she meant our education is multiplied enormously when we start work and have to face the world, but it seems to me that we have changed, grown, and increased our knowledge incredibly. I believe we have done something to be proud of, and so, this graduation ceremony is much more than the conferring of a degree. It is a calling to mind of what this degree means—a number of years of hard work—and what it promises in the future—a more fulfilling life.

I would like to tell you a story from the Canadian researcher, Hans Selye. It is a story of an alcoholic and his two sons, one was a teetotaler and the other a drunk. When asked to explain their drinking habits both replied “With a father like that, what do you expect?” The moral of the story is that it matters not what we face, but how we face it.

In the final analysis, it is totally up to us, individually, to decide where we want to go, what we want to do, and how we are going to do it.

Abraham Lincoln said the same thing when he said, “You will only be as happy as you make up your mind to be.”

And so I will leave you with my opening quote, and that is;

“The only joy in the world is to begin.”

It doesn’t matter what you begin, but never stop beginning. Go in fighting and decide you are going to make it. Attach your wagon to a star and you will reach your goal. We’ve come this far and this is just the beginning.

My subject this afternoon is "The College and the Nation." It might also be called Education for Citizenship. At the outset, however, the mistake must not be made that I am advocating a purely political education, although in a Provincial University, maintained by a democracy for the benefit of its people, the subject of government and political science should occupy an important place. But whatever vocation the graduates of such an institution may follow, they will all be citizens, and some of them will be leading citizens; and it is with citizenship in the larger sense, the function of a free citizen in a free state, and the place of the College or University in the formation of such a citizen, that I wish to deal. My topic therefore, is the public purpose of education, what the state has a right to expect from its institution of higher education, and whether these expectations are being realized at the present time. It will accordingly be my purpose to point out what a democratic and progressive community, such as ours strives and hopes to be, requires of its members and how its seats of higher learning can help it to that end. To describe the preparation which I conceive the college should give for the varied activities of citizenship, I have found no words more adequate than those of John Milton written almost three centuries ago in his "Tractate:" "I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of Peace and War."

It will not be considered presumptuous, I trust, for one who but yesterday was an instructor in this institution, and but the day before one of its students to request this encaenial audience to give a little honest thought to this most important subject, and he hopes to be accused of disloyalty if he refuses to lull his hearers with the well-worn sentiments of affection so dear to the heart and lips of the elder alumnus proposing the toast to Alma Mater. It is well, no doubt, to echo Daniel Webster's "It is, Sir, a small College, yet there are those who love it." It is better surely, to strive that though it remain a small college, all should respect it.

College Course A Liberal Education

It is generally said that the end of a college course is a liberal education, but when we ask what the meaning or use of a liberal education is, the answer is not always satisfactory. There was a time when a college head at Oxford could tell his students without shame, "Gentlemen, study the Classics. For a knowledge of the Classics, gentlemen, not only enables you to look down with contempt on those who are less well educated than yourselves, but may lead to positions of considerable emolument even in this world." Today, we are hardly satisfied with such a motive, any more than we are convinced of the plain inference intended that a knowledge of the Classics would certainly lead to positions of considerable emolument in the next world. If we who count ourselves fortunate in being college graduates ask ourselves honestly what our college course has done for us, is it possible that our answer would be as absurd as that of the Oxford Don? Let us see what the average college graduate, as represented by that typical American business man, Mr. George F. Babbitt, thinks about it. You will remember that he is arguing with his son Ted, who, instead of wasting four years in college, wants to take a correspondence course in Engineering, and go off and build bridges in China; in the best Americanese, Mr. Babbitt tells us what College has done for him. "No, and I'll tell you why, my son. I've found out it's a mighty nice thing to be able to say that you're a B.A. Some client who doesn't know what you are and thinks you are just a plug business man, he gets to shooting off his mouth about economics and literature, or foreign trade conditions, and you just ease in something like 'When I was at college—of course I got my B.A. in sociology and all that junk.' Oh, it puts an awful crimp in their style! You see, my dad was a pretty good old coot but he never had much style to him, and I had to work darn hard to earn my way through college. Well, it’s been worth it to be able to associate with the finest gentlemen in Zenith at the clubs and so on and I wouldn't want to drop out of the gentleman class—the class that are just as red-blooded as the Common People, but still have power and personality. It would kind of hurt me if you did that, old man." There is great danger to fear that the Arts degree has become for many graduates just what Mr. Babbitt said, a symbol of gentility, and that apart from being such a symbol, it is thoroughly useless, to its possessor and to the community.

The True Purpose of Education

After the contemptible ideal advanced by the Oxford Don, and the useless upstartism which Mr. Babbitt thought justified his four years at college, is it not refreshing and heartening to return to Milton's majestic prose: "I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly and magnanimously all offices, both private and public, of Peace and War." Is not that the true purpose of education, to develop the qualities of the human animal to fit him for membership in a civilized society, to give him those habits of discipline which will make the state strong in time of war, and those habits of decency which will serve to keep it safe in times of peace? Certainly if we keep in view the public purpose of education, there is no other or better answer, than that education to be a preparation for the varied activities of citizenship, and what I would have you bear in mind is the place the college should occupy in that preparation. Former President Hadley has said that the three fundamental things which seem to distinguish civilization from barbarism are order, cleanliness and prudence, and that in a community governed by an absolute monarch or a religious oligarchy, they represent about all that is essential as a basis for citizenship. A free commonwealth or democracy, however, requires more than these. If it is to enjoy civil liberty, it must develop in addition habits of self-control among the great body of its members, and habits of leadership among a considerable number of them. And such habits of self-control and leadership are much harder to secure than habits of order, cleanliness and prudence, for the latter may be imposed and maintained by authority from above, but the latter arise and are sustained in each man's soul. Not only are habits of self-control and leadership more difficult to nurture, but they may be more easily abused. The liberty to do right is also the liberty to do wrong, and the only guarantee the community has against the misuse of self-control and leadership is in the vision and intelligence of its members. To quote President Hadley again, "They must have vision to see and feel what the community needs to have them see and feel, so that ideals of order and cleanliness and upbuilding which tend to carry them forward will have a stronger and more constant appeal than the mere animal instincts which tend to carry them backward. And they must have intelligence to know how these ideals are to be compassed, so that the pursuit of their visions will lead them and their followers in the general direction in which they want to go—not backward into the wilderness, but forward into the promised land. To the habit by which vision is acquired we give the name imagination; to the habit by which intelligence is acquired we give the name of thinking."

Various Habits of Teaching

These habits, as all history teaches, are what the free nations of the world have had to acquire gradually and painfully; these are the qualities which their individual members still have to acquire in order to fit themselves for citizenship in the free communities of modern times. Of course, many different educational agencies contribute to the difficult process of learning these habits; "for teaching habits of order and decency we have the family and the police, for teaching habits of prudence, we have private property, for teaching habits of imagination in the largest and truest sense, we have the theatre, the press and the church, and for teaching habits of thinking, we have the schools." It is obvious that the work of each of, these agencies overlaps one or some of the others, but it is equally patent that the primary duty of the school, in its largest sense, is to teach the habit and train the power of thinking, to develop as high a degree as possible of mental health and intellectual strength.

This then is the business of the College or University, to make intellectual culture its direct scope, to employ itself in the education of the mind. In this process of education, two elements enter, first, the medium through which it is to be wrought and, second, the method by which it is to be achieved. Most of the old controversies have dealt only with the first of these—should the Classics or Mathematics be preferred? Was it possible to acquire culture and sweetness and light from a study of the Natural Sciences? How large a place should be assigned to the Social Sciences? These disputes leave us cold, partly because we are dealing not with a theory of which subject matter is best, but with a condition in which all of them are given a place in the curriculum; but mainly for the reason that the controversies were over the wrong things, as I hope to show you later. They are instructive nevertheless in a negative way, for they illustrate one conception of education which is still extremely prevalent. The ordinary intelligent citizen undoubtedly regards the University or College as a place for acquiring a great deal of knowledge on a great many subjects. The fond parent who sends his offspring to College has usually the same idea. Either he wants his son or daughter to study nothing that is not useful, because that is what he will need in later life, or else nothing that is useful for the reason that unless he learns it in College he will never learn it anywhere. In either case, it is the subject matter that is important, and the prospective student is regarded as a sort of reservoir into which knowledge is to be poured by different teachers in proper proportion. And even the professors have come to regard their function to be merely that of purveyors of information. It is no wonder then that the public have taken at its face value the fundamentally false maxim that Knowledge is Power, when a little thought would show that knowledge, while an indispensable condition of the expansion of mind that is power, is not the same thing. The possession of information is a totally different thing from the power or habit of thought, and it is fallacious to assume that if you secure the former the latter will follow as a matter of course. A memory stored with all sorts of information does not make the educated man or woman, any more than a large dictionary makes a grammar.

Education and Instruction

This confusion of treating education as synonymous with instruction has had very serious consequences in America. It has resulted in much misapplied power on the part of the teachers, in much wasted expense on the part of the administrators, and most important of all, in a failure to train the students so as to fit them to perform justly and magnanimously the offices of peace and war. We are coming to realize that while instruction is and always must be an important element in education, and while knowledge is and always will be of exceptional value to the citizens of a free state, yet the acquisition of knowledge is not the end of education; that it is simply an incident in the larger and more important process of training for the varied work of life, whether it be industrial, social or political; in a word, is the process of training for citizenship.

There is nothing revolutionary or particularly novel in the conception of education I am advocating. On the contrary, it is simply going back to its primary meaning, for to educate is to educe, to make something of a man rather than to put something into him. And I hope to show you that it is the only conception of education that is worth holding and the goal at which we should aim.

Half a century ago the University of New Brunswick, with four or five professors, a curriculum based for the most part on the Classics and Mathematics, and with comparatively limited resources, turned out men second to none in the Dominion. To our modern eyes, the curriculum provided poor and barren fare when contrasted with the interesting mental pabulum it now offers. But with all its barrenness and poverty, this education had two great advantages which went far to balance its defects and which it would have been well to have retained. In the first place it taught the students habits of hard mental work. Whether they were translating Greek or solving problems in higher mathematics, they were doing something for themselves and usually a something that was pretty hard. In such a school habits were formed which enabled men to do difficult things for the sake of a remote end. And in the second place, the college students of that day were compelled to regard the college course as the beginning rather than the end of their education, for the actual knowledge they attained was moderate in amount and not infrequently lacking in human interest. But it was not so much the subject matter that was important, it was the mental discipline acquired in the process. By means of it there was placed in their hands instruments by the use of which they could teach themselves the things they needed to know. The system turned out men mentally alert and trained for the pursuit of whatever calling they might choose in the future.

To Meet Needs of Students

The trouble with the old-fashioned training was that it was too narrow—it tried to teach everybody in the same way, whether the bent of the particular student was a literary one or not. It took no account of two or three other types of mind, to develop which other kinds of subject matter were necessary, and in these cases it tended to degenerate into a treadmill. To meet the demands of this large circle of students, and at the same time that a place might be found in the curriculum for the vast accumulation of scientific knowledge, the colleges added professional or semi-professional courses to replace the old apprenticeship system; they introduced the laboratory method so that a student might gain habits of work and thought by seeing and doing things himself instead of merely reading about them in books, and they adopted the elective system, partly because there were now too many courses to be all taken and partly that the student might indulge his taste and follow his aptitude in the work he would study. The change was inevitable and on the whole salutary, but it has had its drawbacks, from which we are still suffering. The new subjects were less well organized than the old ones; there was a greater temptation offered the teacher to make them purely informational and to require little or no work from the student. They certainly developed the interest of the students and increased their knowledge, but they did not always develop habits of hard work nor the power of independent thinking. Thinking, that is, real thinking is hard work. It requires a serious discipline to force the habit and a disciplined mind to keep it up. If, therefore, a student is encouraged to take only those things which interest him, there is certainly danger that he will dodge the hard parts of thinking, that he "will choose the easy way to knowledge rather than the hard road power." It has further resulted also in the idea that taking a college course is a pleasant way to pass four years of one's youth and in a mob clamoring to be educated, whether its members are capable of benefitting from a college education or not. The financial burden becomes a very serious one for the colleges and in some cases hopeless one, and they are forced, even the richest and largest of them, like Harvard, to limit the number of students they will admit. And it has resulted in hopelessly over-worked college staffs, so busy preparing and delivering lectures that they have themselves little time to think.

Places of Costly Instruction

In short, our colleges have become places of costly instruction instead of economical education. Now, I will be asked, how do I propose to remedy this condition? Certainly not by turning back the hands of the clock; but equally certain a great deal can be accomplished by a change in our methods of education. The first defect is the prevalent attitude that a student should be permitted to take any subject he may see fit, on the ground that in this way he will achieve what is euphemistically called a broad and general education; and the second is the naive suggestion that students will ever be made to think for themselves by the magic of a lecture system.

The superstition of a broad and general education is the accidental result of the elective system. As the new sciences kept enforcing their claims to recognition in the University curriculum, it soon became impossible for any student, no matter how gifted, to attempt all the courses, and consequently he was left to pick and choose pretty much as he pleased. On the general principle of "try anything once," the average students picked out courses all over the curriculum, and the authorities made a virtue of necessity and justified the elective system by inventing the explanation that the student was thereby acquiring a broad and general education. It is true that many colleges adopted only a modified form of the elective system, and also that many who at first embraced it with all the fervor of converts have gradually abandoned the principle of indiscriminate election and now insist on a choice of a group of subjects. Nevertheless the American and Canadian University system is still based upon the elective idea. That is: that it is really desirable for the student to acquire information about a wide variety of subjects. The innocent Freshman is accordingly required to sprawl himself over the kingdom of knowledge, to take a little science, a bit of mathematics, something in a dead tongue and somewhat in a live language. Possibly the instruction given in elementary subjects in our high schools is not sufficiently advanced in matter or manner at the present time to avoid this in the fist year of the college course; but certainly after the first year the student should not be allowed to philander among the departments. He should not be permitted us a former colleague of mine once said, "to flirt a while with public finances, then cast his languishing eyes on medieval history and anon dart off to caress organic chemistry." But the fetish of a broad and general education has its effect on the college also, it feverishly sets itself to establish new courses and thus establishes new temptations for the fickle-minded. Every University and especially every State University professes to teach a little of everything, until it reminds one of the little mid-western college which advertised it could offer prospective students everything they could get at Harvard except the "A" as in "Father."

Intellectual Interests

It has already been said that it was originally believed, and rightly believed, that a wider choice of courses would create a greater intellectual stimulus for the student, because it would give him a wider range of intellectual interests. It is obvious now that it has resulted in intellectual dissipation. The student is forced to load his mind with a score of subjects against a memory examination. He has too much on his hands to indulge himself in thinking or investigating for himself. The result is he devours conclusion and premise, the one as greedily as the other; he commits demonstrations to memory and he takes practically everything he is told on faith because he has no time to do anything else. He never settles down to serious work in anything, and as a result he is not really possessed of his knowledge, but merely possessed by it. It is true that he knows a little of everything, but he has become a mere passive receptacle for scraps and details, and finally he leaves his place of education dissipated and relaxed by the multiplicity of subjects, none of which he has ever begun to master, and so shallow as not to know his own shallowness. In many cases about the only part of him that grows during his college years is his body.

It ought to be obvious that only by prolonged and continuous effort upon a single coherent subject, with excursions where necessary into related matters (but without the entangling alliances of unrelated subjects) will a student develop these two qualities of good workmanship—accuracy and thoroughness. If our system insisted on the student growing up mentally under the care of one professor, or a small group of professors teaching related subjects, it would be better for the professors and infinitely better for the students. As it is now, instructors are attempting to teach too many things to too many different kinds of students. "A fragment of a professor instructs a fragment of a pupil in a fragment of a subject," as a brilliant Frenchman has put it. There is too little personal contact between the two. And what mutual relations there are reminds one of the Harvard Lampoon's cartoon of Harvard yard filled with little memorial stones commemorating historical events, on one of which the artist had written the legend, "On this spot President Eliot once bowed to a Freshman."

The Lecture System

The theory that the end of a college course is instruction is responsible in the second place, for the present method of teaching, that is, by the lecture system. No doubt before the art of printing was invented, the teacher had to give his pupils the information they needed. In our day and generation, however, with text books and source books in profusion, it is difficult if not impossible to find a plausible excuse for the criminal waste of time involved in passing out information which the student can and should be made to get for himself. It is bad for the professor. We are all acquainted with the teacher who uses the same notes year after year, until even the jokes become stabilized at certain psychological points in the lectures. It is bad for the instructor also because it gives no chance to the student to put occasional awkward questions and to pry a bit into his ignorance, and stir up again in him that divine restlessness which once possessed him when he began to teach, and before he learned how easy it is to bluff when we know we are acting a part before an audience of children. But it is fatal for the student, because by it we are making it easy for him not to grow mentally, not to observe and listen for himself, and above all not to read for himself. The professor is a pedagogue an instructor of children, not a trainer of men and women. Everything is done for the student which he ought to do for himself. He is entirely too passive, a sort of human sponge soaking up information. He is fed nothing but pre-digested knowledge, he is told the solution before he has really appreciated the problem. The scholar is kept a pupil, a ward under his instructor's care, and not a student in the true sense of the word—one who applies his own mind to the mastery of a subject. The inevitable result of this regurgative method of teaching is that there is a loss of intellectual independence and a failure to develop the power of judgment. It is too easy for the student to accept the ipse dixit of the professor, and to fly to him as his ever present help in time of troubles. Nor does it encourage his powers of initiative, that restless habit of looking out for new facts himself instead of waiting to have them pointed out to him by his instructor, of asking himself questions instead of waiting to have them asked by the teacher in the quiz period. Too often a lecture course means a loaf of ten weeks, and a preparation for examination of one night, and it is not unknown for a student to receive more mental stimulus from writing one article for the college magazine, or preparing one speech for a debate than he does out of his regular work.

Standardized Courses

Is it too much to ask that we get away from this mechanical factory of standardized courses, and that we attempt instead a really creative teaching? That we cease attempting to teach our youth to compete with the enclyclopaedia, and that instead we train it to use the encyclopaedia to the best advantage? As Cardinal Newman has well said: "Education is a high word; it is the preparation for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation. We require intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes for sight. We need both objects and organs intellectual; we cannot gain them without setting about it; we cannot gain them in our sleep or by haphazard. The best telescope does not dispense with eyes; the printing press or the lecture room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to ourselves, we must be parties in the work. A University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill." Society is not so much concerned with what its members know as with the use they can make of their knowledge. It requires men and women who can verify their information, see its bearing on their own conduct and act accordingly. It is thinking in the practical sense of the word that is necessary, and it is this which the colleges should teach, whatever else they do or leave undone. If we can train students in the habits of mind they will need to use in their lives, by the use of subjects they will probably not use, and if we can train each of for the kind of profession he is fitted for without attempting to forestall the professional school or exhausting the field of knowledge we should be content. Let the student settle down to at least a two-year marriage with one of the departments, and abandon his wanton flirtations with all of them, let the courses be so framed that he will have to do his own reading and thinking, and let the examinations be tests of power rather than of memory, and we shall have gone a long way toward a real education. With a group of students working with one professor in an entire subject, the latter directing and stimulating the former, a system of instruction in which the formal lecture would be replaced by an analytical discussion of a part of the subject matter already read and at least partially understood, and an examination made up of problems involving the principles discussed in class, but differing in the facts presented from any the student has heretofore studied, a college would become a place of real mental illumination and intellectual culture. The student would not he sent out, as now only too often he is, with nothing, to use a phrase made famous by Mr. Justice Holmes, "but a rag-bag full of general principles—a throng of glittering generalities—like a swarm of little bodiless cherubs fluttering at the top of one of Corregio's pictures." The teacher would become a modern Socrates, an intellectual mid-wife aiding the student to bring forth his own ideas.

An Ideal to be Approached

I have no doubt the programme I have outlined seems a hard saying. After a decade of teaching in High School, College and Professional School, I am bound to admit that it is an ideal to be approached rather than a result to be attained. But that does not detract from its value. Practically all objections come from two sources: the old graduate would complain that the college was making a lot of grinds of its students, and that no time would be left for extra-curriculum activities. There is little danger, however, that a body of live young men and women could not find time for physical and social recreation. On the other hand, I am free to admit that it would drive out the student for whom the intellectual side of the institution is merely an incident to his athletic or social career, the one for whom in the words of President Wilson, "the side-show has swallowed the circus." The second objection would come from that large group of the public which holds it as true and self-evident that every person has a right to a higher education if he wants it, whether he be fitted to profit by it or not. Let us not forget, however, that university education is for the benefit of the public, that what the student or his parents pay does not begin to represent the cost of his education. We cannot afford to make our colleges and universities asylums for the wilfully uninterested. "Higher education at public expense should be regarded as a privilege to be earned, not as a right to be abused."

I am greatly honoured by this occasion. This University, from whose halls so many distinguished men and women have gone to enrich the life of this and other countries, confers a distinction on that person who is invited to address its graduating class.

One hundred and forty years have passed since Dr. William Paine and six other Loyalists induced the Governor and Council of this Province to establish an Academy, endowed with a free site and lands for its maintenance. That was the beginning of this institution. If anyone qualified to do so should write the history of the University of New Brunswick through the long swing of years from that early day, the record would certainly be most inspiring.

For many years I have been interested in all educational institutions of Canada, particularly in McGill of my own city, and Queen's University, Kingston - because of my long friendship with its honoured Principal. I feel, too, that I should take a very special interest in this University of my native Province. I intend therefore to follow closely the progress of the Half Million Dollar Endowment Campaign recently inaugurated by one of your distinguished graduates -the Right Hon. Sir George E. Foster.

During his lifetime Sir George has been closely identified with many movements benefitting both Canada and the Empire, yet I venture to say that no more worthy matter than this Endowment Fund has commanded his attention or won his support. This Fund deserves the enthusiastic backing of all of our citizens, and particularly of New Brunswick people resident in this or other countries.

Many citizens residing in Quebec, Ontario, and in the far Western Provinces, recognize that the Confederation Pact calls for certain special considerations for the Maritime Provinces. Of late there has been inquiry how these special considerations might best be given. Might I suggest to these friends that one way in which this can be done, and in a most helpful and enduring form, would be to assist this Endowment Campaign liberally. No University can do its best work if it is continuously hampered for funds. The marvel is that this institution has been able to accomplish so much with the meagre aid it has had from the New Brunswick Legislature and from private citizens. Let us hope that the hearts of Chancellor Jones and those associated with him may be gladdened by the generous support that this Endowment Fund will receive from many men in Canada interested in the maintenance and advancement of higher education.

Opportunity to secure a College education was denied me, and I have felt this handicap all my life. I am the more anxious, therefore, that the young people of today shall have the greatest opportunity to secure an education to fit themselves to serve the community in an adequate way. Three of my own young people are graduates of McGill, and I hope to see my two younger children complete their courses there.

I am aware that spending four, five or six years in college does not necessarily mean a successful career for every student. We know that not all college bred men can be heard from after they leave their Alma Mater. But all things being equal, the man or woman who has received a college training has an infinitely better chance of making good than the one who has had to be satisfied with a more moderate education.

It has been said that a college is frequently a place where they polish a pebble and dim a diamond. The following figures recently made public regarding some of the distinguished men of the United States amply refute this and prove the enormous benefits of a college education. The record is as follows:With no schooling - of 5 million only 31 attained distinction.
With elementary schooling - of 3 million 808 attained distinction.
With high school education - of 2 million 1,245 attained distinction.
With college education - of 1 million 5,768 attained distinction.The child with no schooling has one chance in 150,000 of performing distinguished service - with elementary education he has four times the chance - with high school education 87 times the chance - with college education 800 times the chance.

Do you appreciate your chance?

The Irishman's definition of a grape-fruit was - "a lemon that had a chance." I should not like to call any of the young people before me "lemons," even though they might have been so designated before they had the chance this University has given them. I am certain that all of you are now in the "grape-fruit" grade, and that continuously you will bring cheer and refreshment to those with whom you come in contact.

It is increasingly true that the hope of the future lies in the youth of the present. Every young person is a potential leader in law, in medicine, in science, in art, in commerce, or in other of the many activities of life. This is particularly true of the college graduate. In the coming days his words and his actions will inevitably exert a strong influence over those of his fellow men with whom he is in contact. In the study of economic, social and political problems, which undoubtedly has engaged your attention, I feel sure you have recognized that the training you have had is intended not alone for your personal benefit, but for the larger opportunity of serving the community, and for a fuller and more effective discharge of your obligations to the public.

The students of this and other universities, I believe, are not seeking to acquire an education simply for selfish purposes, and for personal gain. In the main I am sure they are conscious of the duty of the individual in public service, and recognize that their main objects should always be to cure diseases; to remove ignorance; to improve agricultural and industrial methods; to make and enforce just laws, and generally to lift their generation to a higher standard.

I trust that not one member of this graduating class will feel as did a recent graduate of the University of Nebraska, who, not finding it easy to secure a position, made the following complaint: "At the University they trained my mind by methods of study, they crammed it full of history, philosophy, theory and facts, but left me untrained to meet the world and its problems. My University has failed me; it taught me idealism, when I needed realism. If I criticize, I offer also a remedy. Discard a history, a philosophy, a Greek, a geography, a Latin, and an economic instructor, and hire a $15,000 a year man who has trained men and knows men."To my mind that man was expecting altogether too much from his University - or rather he was expecting that which his University never proposed to give him. The University is not a Trade School, nor does it pretend to place special emphasis on the money-making side of life. A college course is intended primarily to train the students to think for themselves. Those who prepare the Curriculum believe that the general culture a student receives as a result of his studies is of inestimable value, and that the making of money is not the primary nor highest objective.

New Brunswick, like the other Provinces of Canada, recognizes that comparatively few of her young people can afford the time or the means to take a college course, and hence through its vocational schools and its Composite High Schools, provision is made whereby the boys and girls of the Province can obtain an education that will fit them for a useful and happy life.

New Brunswick, with less than 400,000 people, has invested more than three-quarters of a million dollars to provide accommodation for vocational training, not including the cost of equipment of these institutions. This means that provision has now been made for more than 1500 full time day vocational students, and twice that number of evening pupils.

During the years in which I have been associated with the Montreal Technical Institute I have seen hundreds of boys and girls graduate, well equipped to earn a good living, and to serve the community in which they reside. And yet I am coming more and more to value an education for its own sake. It is a wonderful asset to have a cultured mind, to be able to absorb and enjoy the best literature; and to converse intelligently with well read men and women. Educated people in the community broaden the life of the people, and by their inspiration and example enrich the whole structure of existence.

We must not overlook the fact that we all must make a living, but let us not forget that while we are making a living we are also living a life. I hope that no young man or woman leaving these Halls of Learning today is going out with any idea other than that the only life worth while is the life that is given to the service of mankind. If this be your objective then you will cultivate the helpful spirit that brings its own reward. Perhaps I can best illustrate this with the following simple story:

A man moving from Johnstown to Jamestown, passing along the highway with his load of furniture, saw a farmer standing at a gate. He held up his horses, and asked the farmer if he could tell him the type of people living in Jamestown. 'Well,' exclaimed the man, 'I am moving so as to be able to live in a more agreeable atmosphere. The people in Johnstown, in my experience, are narrow, disagreeable, selfish, ungrateful, poor neighbors, and I am very glad to get away from them.' The farmer replied, 'I am sorry to say that you will find in Jamestown exactly the kind of people you are leaving behind in Johnstown,' and the man passed on his way much depressed.

The next day it so happened that another man moving from Johnstown to Jamestown also hailed the farmer, and asked him the same question - what type of people he would probably find in the town to which he was going. The farmer asked him the same question that he asked the man of the previous day, - what type of people was he leaving behind him in Johnstown. This man told him that it was breaking his heart because he had to leave the very best people in the world. They were good neighbors, most considerate, helpful and thoughtful to a degree, and he was doubtful if he would find elsewhere a community in which one could reside with the same degree of happiness. The farmer repeated to him what he said to the other man, - that he would find in Jamestown exactly the kind of people that he had left behind him in Johnstown.

The moral is, "If you want to have a friend, - be one!" The spirit we inject into the community where we live comes back to us in like measure. Any education that does not bring to the home and to the community the kindly helpful spirit, has not fulfilled the expectations of the Founders of our Universities. To quote Milton's definition of education:I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of Peace and War."No doubt you have occasionally, during the years of study, felt that your college work was much of a grind. Do you to-day realize that the grind was well worth while? You may be likened to the glass that by means of much grinding becomes lens of a telescope, which brings the stars nearer and reveals myriads of worlds that men knew not existed. The best that is in us has been brought out through the process of grinding. Good things are generally difficult, but difficulties should prove to be a real stimulus to all well balanced minds.

May I express the hope, that even though it may mean some temporary sacrifice, the young people graduating to-day from this University will take up their life's work in Canada, where they can do so much to develop and strengthen the best that is in our land. We can ill afford to lose our College Graduates who have secured their education by the sacrifice of so much time, energy and money, and who bring to their life work youth, health, strength, a trained mind, and broadened, enlightened vision.

In connection with the cost of educating students in that institution, Dr. W.E. MacNeill, Registrar and Treasurer of Queen's University, Kingston, calls attention to the following facts:

At the end of the course a student in Arts had cost the University $916 over and above what he paid in fees - a student in Medicine $1812, and a student in Science $2096.

A large American Life Insurance Co. makes the statement that it costs $6077 to bring up a boy, and $6617 to bring up a girl to the age of 18. I leave it to the ladies to explain why it costs $540 more to bring up a girl than it does a boy. I do not know the amount that is allowed in the above figures for schooling, but they certainly do not provide for a college education. If one, therefore, takes the insurance figures given by Dr. MacNeill, and further adds the fees paid during the years spent in college, you can see that each Graduate Student has cost Canada about $10,000.

Now if our College Graduates leave the country, not only do we suffer this large monetary loss, but we also lose their earning power for the remainder of their lives. Much greater still is the loss of constructive leadership in the Arts, Sciences and Industries that we expect from them - not to say anything of the irreparable loss of moral and spiritual leadership when the young men and women of our hearts and homes leave for a foreign land.

I think I see signs that at last our Legislators and Statesmen are awaking to the fact that our neighbors to the south are making the strongest kind of bid for our best people, and that we as Canadians must to some extent follow the fiscal policy and the business methods of the United States. Such a policy would, I believe, result not only in holding the people whom we now have within our horizons, but, also, through the development of our natural resources and our industries, many of our sons and daughters now living in the United States might be induced to return to Canada. We welcome to our shores men, women and children, sound in body and morals, from other lands; but these people, valuable as they are or may become, can but inadequately take the place of those who have gone out from our own firesides, and whose hearts we trust are longing for the home land.

Some of our people have become pessimistic about the opportunities that lie before the young people of this country, and we need to remind ourselves occasionally of the value, present and potential, of the land of our birth.

In 1903 our national wealth was approximately $1100 per capita, while in 1923 it stood at $2400 per capita. On this basis our wealth is greater than any country in the world other than Great Britain and the United States, and having regard to our undeveloped resources Canada is doubtless the wealthiest country on the globe. Arable and pasture land in Canada is only 3.1 per cent, under cultivation against 26 per cent under cultivation in the United States, and the same percentage in Great Britain.

On the average every resident of Canada owns more than one-half a square mile of territory apiece. This is God's choice land - rich in mineral, timber and agriculture, furs and water powers. It is the last great tract still to be peopled.

We have room here for millions of prosperous and happy homes. How satisfactory it would be to all of us if these millions that are certain to come to Canada could have the inspiration and the leadership of our College Graduates; men who have had such thorough and careful training for the task. Without the right kind of leadership the coming of these people from the countries of Europe may prove to us a curse rather than a blessing.

On this occasion I suppose one is expected to offer a few words of counsel to the Graduating Class. I am sure that in so far as the fine group of young people I see before me is concerned this is scarcely necessary. Still, there are some things that only come to us through years of experience, and therefore I take the liberty of quoting one who has passed the meridian of life, and who in looking back over his past has come to the conclusion that there were certain things he would do if he were twenty-one again. Here they are:

HEALTH. - I should underwrite good health by a balanced diet, avoiding alcoholic beverages, and taking five miles of oxygen each day on foot.

PLAY. - I should find my recreation, not in reading about games nor in watching them, but in playing them.

WORK. - I should choose some trade or profession in which my imagination would have freedom of action, and I would learn to love work for its own sake.

MIND. - I would preserve the health of my mind by feeding it less newspaper and more history, biography and Bible.

SERVICE. - I would strive each day to do something myself for some less fortunate individual rather than pay someone else to do it.

FRIENDSHIP. - I would be more interested in being a friend than in having friends, and would take time to keep the fences of friendship in repair.

HUMOR. - I would spend some time each day in the garden of humor, smiling at the flowers and pulling out the weeds.

PATRIOTISM. - I would practice the virtue of patriotism in times of peace as well as in days of war.

May I add a paragraph of my own:

I shall call this your Dish Pan and your Hoe. Get what enjoyment you can out of the daily round, the common task. Dishes must be gathered and washed. One must strive and labor till all are cleared and laid orderly away. This must be repeated morning, noon and night during a lifetime. It is the same old grind.

Then your work with the hoe calls to you, and this call seems to come when the sun is the hottest and the fishing and swimming are the best. There is hoeing and spade work to be done, and we shirk doing our share at our peril. Self-denial may be necessary, but the ultimate results of doing our duty are always good.

My last word is to thank Chancellor Jones and his associates for giving me the opportunity of addressing this splendid group of students; and to offer to those graduating my hearty congratulations on having attained the goal of their ambition, and to wish each one the utmost success to which his heart and mind aspire today.

Four years ago the Encaenia for the class of 1926 seemed a long way off but the time for which we have been striving for is here and we, as graduates, are about to pass through the portals of our Alma Mater into a different phase of life. We are leaving the life of a society with a simplified, purified and graduated environment and entering into the larger and more complex life of the Great Society. It is with regret that we sever our connections with this University and its pleasant associations to put into practice the knowledge we have gained here. And now that the time of parting has come it is but fitting that we briefly review our sojourn here, and give a brief sketch of the activities of the student body during the past year.

One beautiful September morning in the year of 1922 a group of some thirty five youths and maidens might have been seen hovering at the foot of College Hill, then slowly ascending with hearts aflutter and with many a misgiving. About half-way up we were met by the Sophomores who conducted us to the gymnasium where we were given our rules and regulations. Shortly before nine o'clock we were escorted through the back door of the Arts Building into the presence of the Chancellor who gave us such a hearty welcome that we felt inclined to doubt the words of the Sophomores and believe that we were indeed members to the student body. Soon we had entered with zeal into our work and even the restrictions imposed hy the upper classmen did not dampen our spirits.

We started our second year with only twenty-six in the class—a small number to be guardians of an unruly freshman class of some sixty students. However, our duties were performed with efficiency as the present Junior class will bear us record. As Sophomores we entered more whole-heartedly into the social functions of the student body and received some distinction in interior decoration when we constructed a reproduction of King Tutankhamen's Tomb in the Old Chapel as part of the decoration for the annual Conversazione.

In our Junior Year we started with twenty-seven, but during the year two of these dropped out so we began our Senior Year with a class of twenty- five. Seven students from the Law Faculty in Saint John now join our ranks, making a graduating class of thirty-two.

As we finish our last year here our hearts are saddened by the call to the Great Beyond of Raymond Moore, one of the graduating class from the Law Faculty. It is with sincere sympathy that we remember his dear ones whose sorrow will be touched anew on this our graduating day.

An Endownment Fund for the University was begun last year—a plan full of economic foresight adopted by the Senate, which we owe to the Rt. Hon. Sir George Foster. It requires for its fulfillment the co-operation of all who have the interest and the future of the University at heart. Lately an encouraging beginning was made by the Chancellor and the special Committee concerned, of which you will have been elsewhere informed. Among ourselves the Forestry Association has pledged the sum of five hundred dollars. The class of 1926 is prepared to do its share and already many of its member have given pledges for contribution to this fund.

The several athletic activities and social functions of the past year have been carried on with a marked degree of success.

This year's football, hockey and basketball teams have all won intercollegiate championships. The crowning success was the winning by the football team, of the McTier Trophy, emblematic of the championship of Eastern Canada—a title to be envied by any team or college.

The championship game was played in Montreal and was regarded by those who saw it as an exhibiton of good, clean sportsmanship and thorough combination in which each worked for all and all for each. These two features, together with the help afforded by the excellent turn out to practices, are indispensable to great success in any line of athletics.

The team of the recently formed Rifle Association made a good showing in the annual competition for the D. A. R. Cup. It lead the Maritime Colleges and came fourth in the Dominion.

Our debating teams have made a very favorable showing in the intercollegiate debates, but much of the enthusiasm and co-operation evident in athletics is lacking in debating. We hope that in the future the whole hearted support of the student body will be given to the President of the Debating Society. By so doing the lack of interest could be and would be acquired.

The Engineering Society, Forestry Association, and Ladies’ Society have had a successful year. All have co-operated under the Students’ Union with a unity of purpose—to boost the U. N. B. in all its activities. The members of the Ladies Society are especially to be thanked for their untiring efforts in helping to make the social functions of the Students’ Union a success. Another help to the social life of the college is found in having an efficient five-piece orchestra which has always been willing to give its services whenever called upon.

Mock Trial and Mock Parliament were again carried on according to precedent and again drew large audiences. The second session of Mock Parliament was of more than social value as it was resolved into more or less of an open forum where student activities and grievances were frankly discussed. If mock parliament were run under the guidance of and as a function of the debating society, instead of under the Student’s Union, it seems very probable that debating would benefit by the change.

This year has seen another addition to the equipment of the Athletic Club House at College Field, the construction of which was started last summer. We do not wish to forget that it was largely due to the generosity to many of the citizens of Fredericton, graduates, and friends of the College, in giving financial assistance that the students were able to complete this club house.

Many things, such as, the completion and equipping of this new memorial building; the addition of a broadcasting set to the Electrical engineering laboratory; and success already achieved in the plan for the endowment fund; go to prove that we are leaving an institution that is growing and progressing along every line, an institution that will continue to be ranked high among the colleges of the land. But is it because of the growth of the University by reason of its augmented enrolment and added equipment that we feel more that ever the need of a well equipped and well organized library under the supervision of a man who is in a position to give his undivided attention to it. We do not wish to be left behind other universities of the Maritime Provinces in this respect and earnestly hope that the Senate will do what it can for us in the coming year.

And now before leaving, I would like to extend to you, Mr. Chancellor, and gentlemen of the Faculty, our heart felt gratitude and appreciation of your efforts in our behalf. Your patient instructions and interest in our future welfare, will be a stimulus to our success through life and may the glory of any success we may attain rebound to you.

To the citizens of Fredericton, we extend our sincere thanks for the numerous ways in which you have made our stay in your beautiful city so pleasant, and also for the ever ready assistance rendered to student enterprises. Your interest in our activities, your ready response to our urgent needs and your pride in our athletic achievement will spur us on to greater victories.

Undergraduates, we depend upon you to faithfully carry on the glory of the U. N. B. From the able and willing support we have received from you during the past two or three years we know that the truth is not misplaced.

Classmates, our friendship has been sweet and the parting is difficult. Let us go forward into this broader and more complex society with a determination to be leaders.

"One ship drives east and another
drives west
While the south same breezes blow;
It's the set of the sails and not the
gales
That bids them where to go.
Like the winds of the seas are the
ways of Fate
As we voyage along through life.
It's the set of the soul that decides the
goal
And not the storms or the strife."

And now the last and hardest word of all to utter. Faculty, Citizens of Fredericton, Classmates, dear old Alma Mater, Farewell!

To quote one of Joe’s letters of nomination: “Joe’s story is a true inspiration”. Born in China, Joe moved to Hong Kong at the age of 12 to join his father – in dramatic fashion. He and 4 other boys made the journey by floating on a pillowcase filled with ping pong balls across kilometres of open water before being picked up by a fisherman. In 1968 Joe arrived in Canada to study electrical engineering, spending his first two years at the University of Prince Edward Island and then transferring to UNB to complete his engineering degree. After obtaining his degree, he returned to Hong Kong, but happily a friend convinced him to return to Canada, and he found work at Stelco in Hamilton, Ontario.

His career as an employee was fairly short-lived. After a three year secondment to Dofasco, Joe made the decision to go into business for himself, and hence in 1980 JNE Engineering was born. JNE extended its reach to China shortly after its inception. In 1994, JNE Engineering expanded to become JNE Consulting Ltd., a full-service multi-disciplinary engineering firm serving a wide range of industries. Today, the Joe Ng Group consists of Joe Ng Engineering, JNE Consulting, JNE Automation, JNE Chemicals, JNE Biotech, and JNE Power, with professional staff and projects around the world, maintaining offices in Canada, the U.S., and China.

Joe has set an example not just by his success in business, but also through his commitment to community, giving generously of both his time and financial support. He has been very active in his involvement with the Hamilton Chinese Community, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Junior Achievement, Habitat for Humanity, the United Way, and community health care institutions and initiatives, including chairing the Cornerstone of Care campaign for Hamilton Health Services. He has been especially active in his support of higher education. He sits on the Faculty of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Board at McMaster University and has established the Joe Ng – JNE Consulting Chair in Design, Construction and Management of Infrastructure Renewal at McMaster, as well as scholarships for international students. He has also been a generous benefactor to UNB, supporting many projects over the years and most recently establishing the Joseph S. Ng Laboratory for Nanotechnology.

Joe Ng has been recognized many times for his business and community achievements. He has received prestigious awards from the City of Hamilton, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, McMaster University, the University of Prince Edward Island and the Professional Engineers of Ontario. In 2002 he received the Golden Jubilee Medal. To once again quote one of his nomination letters, as a “builder of an international engineering corporation, generous supporter of the arts, health care, higher education and his local community, and loyal alumnus of UNB, Joe is a true testament to the potential that can be achieved with vision, determination, and compassion for one’s fellow human beings.” It is the great privilege of the University of New Brunswick to admit Joseph Ng to the degree of Doctor of Science honoris causa.

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from the author.

If a third war starts it will be the last war of all, Hon. Wendell B. Farris, Chief Justice of British Columbia told the Alumni of the University of New Brunswick at the Sesquicentennial Dinner of the University last night. But he added later in his address that "I do not think that a shooting war will start. I am, however, not optimistic enough to believe that in my lifetime the clouds of a threatening war will clear and that the sun will shine upon a glorious day of peace."

(Introduction remarks of Chief Justice Richards omitted)

Justice Farris in his opening address, spoke of the University’s benefactor, Lord Beaverbrook, and that U.N.B. was the first English speaking University in Canada to commence teaching. It has pioneered throughout the years, he said.

Selected U.N.B.

Speaking of the days when he first entered U.N.B. he said, "In those days, there was almost a complete tolerance of the religion and political views of others. My family were traditionally connected with the magnificent educational, but nevertheless sectarian, institution, Acadia College. It was naturally expected I would attend there.

"I wanted to meet the students in my college life as I would meet my fellow citizen in after life, regardless of ethnic or sectarian considerations. I felt the University of New Brunswick could best give me this and I have not regretted my decision."

Not Diligent Student

He said that while in college he was not the most diligent scholar and had learned to play football, hockey and to dance.

"I have also come to realize how much I missed in not giving closer attention to the scholastic side," he said, and added, "I am frank to confess, however, if I were doing it over again and forced to make a choice, I would probably again choose as I did."

Further he said:

"All educational institutions throughout the land are today faced with a real challenge as a result of the world’s trouble and unrest. It is tottering on the verge of destruction. This cannot be accomplished if the great masses are taught the true principles of democracy. Upon the universities today is thrown the great burden of keeping the peoples of the world trained in the ideals which this University has taught for so long.

Present Agitators

"Present day agitators seek to set labour against management; to do away with private initiative and give sole control to the State. Certain State control is necessary but I Was taught in the school that believes our Government should not be antagonistic to private enterprise but should recognize the necessity for the two to work in harmony for the benefit of humanity. The truth of this teaching is exemplified in this, a State University. Its real expansion has only been made possible through the generous beneficence of my Noble Lord the Chancellor co-operating to the fullest extent with the Government of the day."

Training

"To the universities we must look for the training of the men and women who are to guide the destinies of this country in the years to come.

They must be trained in sound practical thinking with proper concepts of the function of Government."

Age of Taxation

The present era is often referred to as the "Atomic Age." I call it the "age of Taxation." Taxation has become a major problem. An unpopular tax may be very beneficial. We are inclined to take too much for granted.

We think of a Government as a Santa Claus and do not recognize the fundamental principle, a Government can only give to the people that which it takes from the people. Some times we wonder if those in authority seeking revenue are not at times inclined to forget the fable of "killing the goose that laid the golden egg." Sometimes these old and simple fables assist the clarity of our thinking.

"The whole economic structure of Canada has changed in the last two years as a result of the apparent unlimited oil resources discovered in the West," he stated, and further said "We should not change our present political system until we know it can be placed by a better system that will work in this country. If we thinking along lines and act on a policy determined not on political prejudice or what may be suitable to some other country, but only on what is best for this country, we can hope with justifiable [confidence] to see increased splendors of this mighty land.

Freedom Itself

"The aftermath of the war has demonstrated that freedom itself, social security and world progress depend upon the financial solvency of countries. Advanced and idealistic thinking is necessary for progress but only when applied with common sense to practical business principles and the realities of life. A brilliant mind trained in political economy but not having been taught that idealistic and advanced thinking must be so applied, if let loose on the world, is as dangerous as an unmarked floating mine in the much-used navigable channel. A [seat] of learning, responsible for such faulty training, is a menace to society," he stated.

German Weakness

"We know that the leaders of Germany were paranoiacs, drug fiends and fanatics, yet even they would never have started the war if they had recognized the power of the United States or that it would enter the war.

"The Russians, whatever else they may be, are cold-bloodedly practical and I think none realize more than they do that to start a shooting war is to commit suicide.

"In the last five years, many great international incidents have occurred and passed over. Previously any one of such incidents would have caused a war. The Council of the United Nations is doing a work few of us realize. It is a sounding board. Steam is let off there. Time is gained and these incidents which I have mentioned and which formerly would have caused war, are aired and forgotten."

"If a third world war ever came," he said, "It would be the last war of all – it would be the destruction of civilization itself."

"In international affairs, as in business, if the parties to a dispute can maintain an even balance, patience, and a personal friendly relationship, the chances of settlement are greatly improved.

"It sometimes takes five to ten years to put through a great business merger when all parties speak the same language. Can you, therefore, wonder with peoples speaking different languages, have different ideologies and whose fundamental thinking is different, that the movements towards a general peace and understand are slow? Russia, until she was attacked by Germany, had little contact with the outside world. Her lack of understanding, the ignorance of her people create an inferiority complex and a suspicious mind always found in the ignorant. This can only be worn down by time and patience.

"All wars in history have been started by a nation in the belief that it will come out victorious. That is not the situation today. Any nation starting a war now knows full well there is no hope of ultimate victory. The most it can hope is that it may itself avoid complete annihilation.

"I do not believe, under these circumstances, a shooting war will start. I am however, not optimistic enough to believe that in my lifetime the clouds of a threatening war will clear and that the sun will shine upon a glorious day of peace. Frictions will arise, wars will be threatened until a new spirit, brought about by education and understanding, has changed the mentality and the very souls of the leaders of some of these countries."

Graduation Address: "The State and the Universities in Great Britain." (19 May 1950). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Before I begin reading to you the dissertation which I have written, there are three tasks for me to perform.

In the first place courtesy demands that I give expression in words to the thanks of that section of the class of 1950 which is placed on the platform. How much more appropriately, how much more eloquently, those thanks could have been expressed by any one of my colleagues present today, than by me. While the honour of belonging to the 1950 class has come to those in the body of the hall as a just reward for toil, sweat and perhaps even tears, to us on the platform it has come as a matter of grace, like manna from heaven. The free gifts of grace will, however, serve only to swell our loyalty and devotion to the learned society which we are today joining or rejoining at Fredericton. If you will forgive a personal reference, I would refer to the fact that my first university college was known as the College by the Sea, and today I feel proud and happy to be elevated to membership of the College on the Hill.

The second thing which I have to do is to bring cordial, sisterly greetings from a big younger sister, the University of London. In doing so I would like to refer to the strong and delightful human links that now connect the two institutions. It has been a real pleasure to my wife and myself to visit that distant vineyard in which there is grown and cultivated that attractive species know in London as the Beaverbrook Scholar. For three sessions we have enjoyed their company in London, they have enriched our society of learning, and they have stimulated us in our world. As one who was privileged to negotiate the arrangements with your munificent chancellor, I am delighted at the success that has attended the venture. My hope is that the scheme, now a proved success, will be continued indefinitely.

The third thing which I must do is to explain very briefly how it happens that I have chosen as the subject of my written dissertation "The State and the Universities in Great Britain".

Experience, first as a vice-chancellor and then as a member of the University Grants Committee, a poacher turned gamekeeper, as it were, has made me a firm believer in two things relating to university life. No university governing body can successfully perform its proper function of planning and developing its university if harassed by undue anxiety about its finances.

And no university can serve its proper purpose in a free community unless it enjoys a healthy measure of autonomy and independence in the planning and execution of its work. And I thought it might interest you on this side to hear how these two things are sought to be secured in Britain today.

An increasing measure of public attention is being paid in various countries to the universities and their problems. So far as Great Britain is concerned this derives, in part, from a greatly extended public interest in education generally and a more insistent demand by all classes in the community for a share in the privileges of higher education, and, in part, from a general appreciation of the important scientific, technical, administrative and other contributions which the universities were able to make to the national effort during the second world war.

While, on the one hand, many of the normal functions and activities of the universities had to be suspended during that war, there was, on the other hand, an artificial stimulation of such of their activities (particularly in the fields of science and technology) as were directly related to the needs of the war machine. Once the public interest in higher education had become aroused and the benefits of university education had become more widely appreciated, and once it had been realised how valuable the assistance of the universities could now be in a national emergency, it was only natural for the state to stimulate the expansion of the universities and the university colleges in peace time, and to expect, in due course, contributions from them during the post-war period of economic and social re-adjustment.

The extended interest in the universities of England and Wales after the war is reflected in the great increase in student numbers, in the appearance of a number of important publications - official and unofficial - on different aspects of university work, and in the very substantial increase in the financial assistance in the form of direct grants in aid to the institutions themselves and in the form of grants to students from both the central and local authorities. This widespread public interest, however, has had its embarrassing moments, its obvious difficulties, and its hidden dangers; for public attention often brings with it public criticism. In the past academic workers have normally shunned publicity. They have been more than content to carry out their duties in the seclusion of their institutions. They have enjoyed comparative immunity from public criticism; and their attention has not been unduly distracted by considerations of publicity. Henceforth they may have to reckon more and more with public discussion of their activities; and they may expect to have to answer more questions from the public about different aspects of their work.

Conscription and direction were common instruments of government in Britain during the war period. Government planning and control tended to take their place in the period immediately following. In the political, social and economic mood of the people prevailing at the conclusion of the war, public interest in the universities might well have taken the shape of a demand for direct government control of universities by a Minister of the Crown; for example, by the Minister of Education or the Lord President of the Council. Fortunately, this particular threat never materialised and so, for the time being at least, a potential danger to the independence or autonomy of the universities and university colleges of Great Britain was avoided.

Two things in particular seem to me to have contributed to the passing of this danger. First and foremost among them is the tradition of sturdy independence which has become a valued heritage of British university life generally. Some of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge owe their origin to royal patronage, others to prominent royal or court influence: a number of provincial universities could not have come into existence or continued to flourish without ready and generous local and municipal support. The constitutions of a great number of our universities and university colleges take the form of royal charters. Notwithstanding all this I know of no occasion in modern times when the independence of the universities from government and private interests has not been recognised as both desirable and proper. This tradition of autonomy is a real source of strength and sustenance to the universities in facing their present tasks.

Second but almost equal in importance to the first consideration is the establishment and growth in influence and authority of the University Grants Committee. This is a committee which was first set up by the British Treasury in 1919. The practice for the first 24 years of its existence was to confine its membership to persons not in the active service of a university. But in 1943 this practice was abandoned and the committee, as now constituted, combines a majority of persons drawn from the current stream of academic life.

When it was originally appointed in 1919 the committee's terms of reference were:-
"To enquire into the financial needs of university education in the United Kingdom and to advise the Government as to the application of any grants that may be made by Parliament towards meeting them."Twenty-seven years later (in 1946) these terms of reference were reconsidered; and as a result of this reconsideration, and in the light of experience, and in the then prevailing mood of the country, they were extended and were more fully defined by the addition to the original terms of the following words:- "to collect, examine and make available information on matters relating to university education at home and abroad, and to assist in consultation with the universities and other bodies concerned, the preparation and execution of such plans for the development of the universities as may from time to time be required in order to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs."The latter part of this new paragraph is significant in its reference to plans for the development of the universities to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs. It suggests that to the University Grants Committee's task of serving as an effective and acceptable link between the universities and the agencies of central government, and in particular the Treasury, there has been added the duty of gauging national needs with respect to education at the university level and guiding the universities in meeting those needs.

How can this guidance be given without prejudice to the autonomy of the universities? One cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question without giving some consideration on the one hand to those branches of university activities in which the guidance will be necessary, and on the other hand, to the methods whereby the universities are now financed in Britain. Before we embark on such a consideration I think I can confidently assert that there is at the present moment no shadow of any threat in Great Britain to academic freedom in the sense of the freedom of the community of intellectuals that forms the university to do its work in the way the members of that community think best. The state, for example, does not interfere with the freedom of the scientist to think as he likes; it does not restrain the historian from publishing in such form as he chooses the result of his researches; it does not forbid the academic lawyer from criticising the law and its administration. Le me illustrate this by reference to what has been happening elsewhere.

During the last five years a series of cultural crises seem to have occurred in Russia. Some of these culminated in notable purges, particularly in the fields of medical and biological researches. These crises seem to have followed a distinct pattern and to reflect a planned state attempt to isolate the country from western science and culture. A distinguished British scientist, Professor Eric Ashby, in the Listener, March 30th, 1950, at page 549, described the plan and its purpose in these words:-"The Soviet economy urgently needs short-term technical research, and the application of well-established scientific principles to industry. Therefore for the present many Soviet scientists must be content to be handmaids of industry. Russia cannot yet afford to release her scholars into the intellectual climate of western Europe, for in the west the state adopts an attitude of non-intervention toward intellectuals. Even though most western scientists nowadays depend on state patronage, they do not expect (and I think they would deeply resent) any dictation from their patrons. This relation between the state and the intellectual, which we regard as natural and beneficial, is (in my experience) most attractive to the Soviet scholar, but it is incomprehensible to the ordinary Soviet citizen. I often tried in Moscow to explain its merits, and I always failed. To the Russian communist an intellectual worker is in the same category as any other worker. The workers in a boot factory produce boots the public wants, not the boots they think they would like to make; and for precisely the same reasons a worker in a laboratory does the research the public wants, and a novelist writes the stories the public wants. Regarded in this way, the output of a scientist and the output of a factory hand must measure up to the same test: the test of relevance to the needs of society."Whatever may be the reason behind this deliberate policy of academic, scientific and cultural isolation in Russia, its operative existence is unquestioned and must serve as a serious warning of what the loss of academic freedom may mean to a community.

Let me now return to the consideration of the problem of planning British universities and guiding them to meet national needs. As was pointed out in the report of the University Grants Committee for the years 1935-1947 the solution of this problem "is immensely facilitated by the fact that the Government adhere, no less firmly than the universities themselves, to the fundamental principle of academic autonomy. Education and research in the universities of this country are not (and, we believe, are not likely to become) functions of the state; and the story which this report relates is essentially one of a partnership between universities and state, in which each partner has something to take and something to give."

In the academic year 1947-48 (which is the last year for which the full details have been made public), the total income of the universities and university colleges which were in receipt of grants from the University Grants Committee amounted to £16,276,286. This sum was distributed over the main heads in the following manner:

Although the actual amount in each case is up you will have noted that the percentage under every head except one has gone down by 1947-48. The one exception is parliamentary grants which has grown from 35.8 per cent to 57.8 per cent and in 1947-48 amounted to nearly 9½ million pounds. In addition to this sum of nearly 9½ million pounds, the British Treasury contributed through the University Grants Committee no less than £2,148,520 by way of capital grants for building and equipment completed or acquired in the course of the year.

This enormous sum of public money is paid direct by the Treasury to the institutions concerned on the advice of the University Grants Committee. Each university or university college in receipt of a grant is visited by the Committee and asked to submit estimates of its income and expenditure and to indicate its plans for development and its needs generally. The committee reviews these estimates and submits to the Treasury a general statement of the needs of the universities and university colleges in the aggregate. After due consideration the Chancellor of the Exchequer announces in Parliament the aggregate sum of money which he intends to put at the disposal of the University Grants Committee as a block grant for distribution to the different institutions. Until the later years of the war the practice had been for all Treasury grants and to be paid annually for such periods by way of unearmarked block grants. The fixing of the grant for a quinquennial period enabled the universities to plan future developments with more security and gave them more confidence generally. The making of the grant to each institution in one aggregate or block sum, unearmarked for any specific purpose, constituted a clear recognition of the autonomy of the university and its freedom to utilise its resources in the manner it considered best for the fulfilment of its mission.

During the later years of the war period and for the first two year of the post-war period there was, for obvious reasons, a departure from the former practice of making quinquennial grants. In 1947, however, there was a return, at that time generally welcomed, to the former practice. The last few years have also seen two important departures from the practice of making block, unearmarked grants. Substantial sums, in the form of grants for non-recurrent needs have been distributed annually through the University Grants Committee to the different universities for the purchase of sites, buildings and equipment and the erection of new works and buildings. Before the war such grants were rarely made and were then only small in amount. It is expected that this departure from the former practice will continue for the time being, though it is not clear whether the distribution should be announced for periods of one year or five years at a time. The other departure has taken the form of earmarking grants for particular purposes such as to cover the greatly increased cost of medical education, the extension of university facilities for training dentists, veterinary surgeons, agriculturists and economists, and to make better provision for Oriental, African and East European studies.

The expectation is that this somewhat constraining practice of making earmarked grants for special purposes will for the greater part, or perhaps entirely, disappear in the next quinquennial period.

Thus although the universities have since the war become more and more dependent on the state for their finance, the manner in which the grants are made and the intervention of an independent committee between Treasury and the universities contribute in large measure to the maintenance of autonomy in the universities. But it is generally recognised that in administering the much larger funds now at its disposal the University Grants Committee must almost as a matter of course exercise a somewhat greater measure of influence over university policy than hitherto. The government that provides the money is entitled to be satisfied that every field of study which in the national interest ought to be covered at the universities is in fact covered and that the resources which are placed at the disposal of the universities are being used with full regard both to efficiency and to economy. it is a significant fact that the large sums provided by Parliament are entrusted to the universities without the detailed control of expenditure which obtains in other fields of government assistance, and it is equally significant that it is a ministry concerned with finance, that is to say the Treasury, and not with educational or research policy, that appoints the grants committee and receives its reports. It is not solely in the field of finance that the state might have brought undue pressure to bear on the universities. As I have already mentioned, it became obvious before the end of the war that provision would have to be made for the universities to receive considerably increased numbers of students. The universities were taken into consultation by the University Grants Committee and as a result some universities and university colleges planned to enrol twice or three time their pre-war numbers; while other universities, particularly the larger ones, planned only modest increases in numbers; The Universities were encouraged to make provision for increased numbers but received no direction to that effect. They planned according to their own ideas after being informed of the needs of the nation for certain classes of university trained personnel.

Again a large number of Further Education and Training Grants were made by the state to ex-service men and women to enable them to study at the universities; and considerably increased numbers of state scholarships and local authority grants are now given to boys and girls leaving school to proceed to the universities. In none of these cases has any attempt been made to direct any institution to take in such students. It is at all times taken for granted that the universities must not be deprived of an effective choice of their own entrants. In no sphere is the autonomy of the universities more carefully respected than in the selection and admission of their students.

It is not merely in the Treasury that is found an attitude respectful of university autonomy. It is found in all departments of Government who have dealings with the university, for example the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Works, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Labour, and the Ministry of Health.

It will be appreciated from what I have said that there has grown up between the state and the universities in Great Britain during the last five years a relationship that is new and intricate. On the one hand, having regard to national needs and increased costs, a certain measure of central planning is inevitable and the problem has been to arrange this planning while at the same time maintaining academic freedom and traditional university autonomy. It is accepted that some body like the University Grants Committee should make it its business to survey the various fields of academic study in the country as a whole so as to prevent overlapping and undue waste of resources on the one hand so as to see that there are no unfilled gaps on the other hand. Having made the survey it follows that the Grants Committee should guide and stimulate the universities to contract or extend their facilities as the case may be. As the report of the University Grants Committee for 1935-47 observes "central planning on these lines involves no abridgement of academic freedom, for no university is required, or could be expected, to undertake developments against its own considered wishes, and if a university feels impelled to expenditure on purposes for which financial support from the Exchequer is not forthcoming, its remedy is to find a private benefactor to supply the need."

That, in outline, is the manner in which in our British, empirical way we seek to provide the daily bread of the universities without selling their souls to any body, private or public, in the community.

The day which four years ago seemed a far-off one has arrived, and as we look back remembering, as always in retrospect, all of the pleasant days and few of the not-so-pleasant ones. One phase of our lives is over, another begins, and it is with mixed emotions, pleasure and nostalgia that we take our leave of the University of New Brunswick.

It is a great disappointment for us on this our graduation day not to have with us a man who has given unstintingly of his time, his efforts and his material wealth to this university. Due in no small measure to his association with this university, it has achieved a prominence far beyond that which its size would seem to warrant, and particularly so since he accepted an office in the Senate. I refer, of course, to our Chancellor, The Right Honorable Lord Beaverbrook.

This is the 150th anniversary of the University of New Brunswick, an outstanding year in the history of the University, not only because of the birthday celebration, but because it affords us an opportunity to take stock of the important developments that have taken place since the inception of the University. You are already aware of how the University has grown and developed from its humble beginnings to its present state. I will, therefore, touch only on a few important changes at U. N. B. since our arrival here. Through the generosity of our Chancellor we have added a new wing to our library. We have seen a modern floor added to the Forestry Building. There has been a great increase in graduate work, for the quality of which, this university is winning national acclaim. The development of the Alumni office and work deserves special praise, in particular the work of publicity which has been handled by John C. Murray and recently by Robert S. MacGowan. The increased financial support of the New Brunswick government which has enabled the university to met the increasing costs of education, speaks well for the people of New Brunswick, who through their government, make concrete their [d]esires to further education, and finally the fact that U. N. B. has increased by one year the length of the applied science courses and raised the passing mark by 10% to bring U. N. B. into line with other Canadian Universities, is indicative of the leading position which U.N. B. is taking in Canadian education.

The degree which we have received today, is the product of four years of effort, not only by the students but by a great number of persons, for whose assistance, guidance and encouragement we are deeply grateful. I know that members of the graduating class would wish me to express their thanks.

When first we came here, baffled by the strange environment, we were astonished to find that the man whom we had imagined would be unapproachable, was the first to take us under his guidance. During the brief time that we had the privilege of knowing him, his positive personality, his affable manner, and, above all, his humanness, etched themselves deeply on the hearts of us all. We were, indeed, fortunate to have had as our President, the Honorable Dr. Milton F. Gregg, V.C.
Dr. Gregg left us at the end of our freshman year to assume a Cabinet post in the Federal Government, and we discussed with foreboding the probable tyrannical qualities of the man who would take over from him. When that gentleman arrived, we surveyed him with a critical eye to discern some part of his makeup that would confirm our original fears, but we soon grew tired of looking in vain. Dr. Trueman has proven an able administrator, a man with the rare gift of natural tact who weighs carefully his decisions lest they be unfair to anyone, a friend and counselor to the student and an “all round good fellow”.

To you, the Faculty, our debt is great. You have been considerately patient with our limitations and have always been willing to give the extra assistance which is responsible for many of us being here today.

A great deal is certainly due to our parents, wives, and relatives. Most of us were away from home, so to the parents and relatives, the most obvious indication of our presence here was their constantly dwindling bank account. Aside from this, however, without their encouragement, many of us undoubtedly would have left the university. But it is to the wives of the married veterans that the greatest credit must be given.

Our four years here were made pleasant, in no small measure, by the setting of the university: Fredericton is a beautiful city. At times we must have taxed the patience of Frederictonians, but they took our occasional outbursts of exuberance in good part with the attitude that “boys will be boys”. To them also we extend our grateful thanks.

A large percentage of this graduating class would not be here today were it not for the assistance of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. To the people of Canada who, through your own government, made this assistance available to us, may we say that you have given us a priceless gift, and we are grateful.

When we entered the university we found two age groups—the younger students freshly out of high school and the veterans who preceded us here. We had the feeling that we were back in high school but I feel sure that the younger students must have felt that they had entered a home for the aged. We dispensed with the traditional initiations. The success that we have achieved together in all the phases of athletic and non athletic activities tells its own story. The association of the older and younger students was beneficial to both, and the harmony which exists between them speaks well for all concerned. Up to this point I feel sure that I have expresses the opinion of each member of the graduating class.

It is customary for the Valedictorian to inform the members of the graduating class that today they leave the comforting confines of the campus and launch out tomorrow to meet the cruel reality that is Life. My fellow graduates have seen service in all of the major theatres of war; they have returned to civilian life as normal, happy individuals, many of them shouldering the responsibilities of a wife and family. Surely there is little in the way of advice to offer them. There are, however, new forces in the world today which it would be well to consider. The world which we are entering tomorrow is different in many ways from the world of our parents. Theirs was a world of definite beliefs and clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong. A man was judged by his desire and ability to work, the respectability of himself and his family, and the homage which he paid to his God. We never quite knew that kind of world. With the arrival of the machine age, it disappeared. We can only surmise what it has been like from the stories of our elders, the family album, and the writers of the times. Our world today is not the stable, traditional world of our parents but it is rather a world at the crossroads, a crossroads of conflicting ideologies.

In very sphere of life we are being asked to march with one group to the exclusion of all others. How we are to judge intelligently the merits of these various groups. It is obvious that one cannot choose between any two issues without a knowledge of the merits of each. A man who proclaims loyalty to one side of any issue without an adequate knowledge of what the alternative entails is talking propaganda. He has defeated the purpose of education, which is the search for truth through orderly discipline of the mind.

Let us so equip ourselves by careful study and thought on the problems of our time that when the decision is to be made we can make it without fear, secure in the knowledge that we have done our best to reach the truth. Perhaps you labour under the delusion that your opinions and decisions are of no importance to the world. Do not be deceived. We have read in the newspapers a great deal of late, regarding certain individuals who have given what is termed “vital information” to persons deemed unfriendly to the Democracies. We are inclined, justly I think, to criticize them vehemently, and to tell ourselves that we would never do such a thing, and we feel virtuous. Yet among us there are many, many persons who through a lack of knowledge of the consequences, a misguided sense of values, or through greed participate in an act which collectively is as dangerous as giving away the atom bomb. They sell their sacred heritage, they sell their vote. Only slightly less guilty are those who do not exercise their vote through negligence or indifference. Ladies and gentlemen, some 39,000 Canadians lie buried in far-off land that we might choose our own way of life and that we might have freedom from want and fear. Let us not cast lightly aside the results of their supreme sacrifice.

But privileges carry with them responsibilities. Each person must be fully aware of the issue at stake. They must too, have at their disposal able men, to teach them the truth and to implement their desires. That is good education, and good government, which is an outgrowth of it.

As little as 150 years ago, when U. N. B. was first incorporated it was possible to obtain an all-embracing education in a relatively short time. Arts course were naturally accented for little was known of the sciences in those days. More facts have been accumulated in the past 150 years than in all the proceeding time. Indeed, it is difficult to keep abreast of the developments in one small section of any one field; specialization has become a necessity.

Our universities are turning out two types of individuals, each of which has a misguided, though partially truthful, concept of the other. Of the non-technical man, the technical man says “impractical, dreamer, idealist,” and sometimes, it must be confessed he adds, “useless”. While that type says of the technical man, “completely lacking in culture, a human adding machine” and may add under his breath of course, for these technical men are often the athletic type, “stupid.” Why this attitude by supposedly educated people towards another fact of education? What is the purpose of education? In the words of Milton: “I call, therefore, a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public.” What does this imply? It implies a balanced education. We must have no educational misfits in our society. It is imperative that men of all levels of education associate freely and intimately together so that we have a fusion of idealism and factual necessity. It is well to bear in mind, that all men have their place in society, the great reforms were born first in the mind of the idealist, set down by the pen of the poet, made possible by the scientific advances of technical men and implemented with the sweat of the common man.

It is a tribute to Canadians that they are contributing vast sums for a long-range educational policy that will, I am sure, make Milton’s dream someday a reality.

Citation: CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 2009
JAMES DAVID O'BLENIS
to be Doctor of Science

A native of Salisbury, New Brunswick, David O'Blenis graduated from UNB with a civil engineering degree in 1963. After obtaining a master of engineering degree from West Virginia University the following year, he taught engineering for three years at the Royal Military College in Kingston before joining the Canadian Armed Forces. He spent more than 25 years with NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command beginning as a pilot and Squadron Commander. For three years he was in command of Canada's fighter and radar surveillance forces, and eventually served as Deputy Commander in Chief of NORAD, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant General in 1995.

General O'Blenis then applied his leadership and management skills to the corporate world. Joining Allied Signal Canada as Vice-President, Business Development and Government Affairs, he became President in 1999 and led the Canadian integration of Allied Signal with Honeywell, serving as President and Chairman. In 2001 he became President of Raytheon Canada Limited, a company with more than 1,400 employees throughout Canada and a world leader in many high technology fields. Since his retirement from that position in 2007 he has been Chairman of Allen-Vanguard Ltd., a Canadian company providing counter-terror protection systems.

General O'Blenis has been a strong proponent of higher education in general, and UNB in particular. He supports two scholarships, one for graduates of Salisbury High School and one in Smith Falls Ontario, and has been a long time financial supporter of UNB. More recently, on the creation of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society in 2006, he agreed to chair the National Council and has committed to helping the centre establish a solid resource base.

Dave has received a number of awards in recognition of his leadership abilities. He was decorated by the Governor General in 1990 with the Order of Military Merit, in the rank of Commander, the highest level for this award. He has also received the United States Air Force Legion of Merit. He has served on various aerospace and defence industry boards, including the Canadian Association of Defence and Securities Industries of which he was chair.

His early training as a pilot led to a lifetime of flying, including anti-submarine patrol duties, air defence operations and advanced jet instruction assignments. He has earned Transport Private, Commercial, Flight Instructor and Designated Flight Test Examiner ratings. He currently operates the Smith Falls-Montague airport and teaches flying to students of all ages. His other passions are hunting and fishing. He was only 12 when his father first took him hunting and their fall expeditions continued until his father was 90.

We are pleased today to recognize a native New Brunswicker, and UNB graduate with this honorary degree.

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from the author.

What a great privilege and an honour it is to be addressing my first group of UNB graduates in my new role as president.

My wife Diane, my daughter Maggie and I are thrilled to be in New Brunswick and are settling into our new home. Maggie is attending high school, learning alongside hundreds of students who will come to UNB to further their education upon graduation.

Although this day includes an installation ceremony, it is first and foremost about our graduates. I would like to begin by offering them a few words of advice.

Graduates, one of the most important factors in your future success is to have a passion for your work. It is our goal that your experiences here will lead you to a career that makes you want to bounce out of bed in the morning ready to change the world.

But passion must be coupled to purpose. Your purpose, as alumni of UNB, should be to take that corner of the world in which you find yourself and make it better.

There will be obstacles. You will make mistakes. Be persistent and believe in yourself. Refuse to take no for an answer. Pave the way for those who follow you just as our alumni have paved the way for you.

Take pride in everything that you do, and ensure that all you do is worthy of that pride. Never underestimate the power you have as an individual to make a difference. Be proudly UNB.

Passion, purpose, persistence, pride: these are the building blocks of success in everything you do.

Each one of you chose UNB for a reason. I hope we have met your expectations. If we did, please go home and tell all of your friends and family. If we did not, talk to me and I’ll try to have it fixed. Your degree from UNB IS important and special.

A global economic recession is upon us, yet our friends continue to make supporting UNB a priority. In addition to remarkable recent gifts from individuals like Eldon and Maxine Clair of Florenceville, Violet Woodroffe of Saint John, Warren McKenzie and Julia MacLauchlan of Seattle and Dave and Wendy Betts of Calgary, we have also witnessed tremendous support from three levels of government, including more than $59 million from our provincial government for capital projects alone.

Their support has enabled:

•Our partnership with Dalhousie University to offer a medical education program in Saint John;
•Our partnership with the New Brunswick Community College;
•The refurbishment of the Canada Games Stadium in Saint John, and;
•The construction of the University Commons in Saint John.

As well we have the landmark Richard J. CURRIE CENTER in Fredericton, which has also been made possible through the great generosity of our Chancellor.

What an impressive list! To our donors and friends, many of whom are here today, I say thank you for putting our students first.

UNB is attracting talented and energetic new individuals and groups to join us in building a self-sufficient New Brunswick. Our recruitment activities bring hundreds of new students into the province every year all of whom are potential residents, investors and advocates.

The focus we are demonstrating with regard to a renewed and vigorous research agenda is creating new opportunities within our province.

We are fortunate to have the working relationship we do with our student government and governments. In addition to the support for the capital projects referenced earlier, we have seen much increased support for our students, for deferred maintenance, and for the community colleges. There is significant new targeted funding towards the goals set out in the province’s post-secondary action plan. Each of these initiatives involves many millions of dollars and each is deserving of our gratitude.

There is one important area where continuing investment is needed and that is our operating grant. Our provincial government’s bold vision is to build the best post-secondary system in the country. We have had strong support from our Premier and Minister to date and I know that will continue.

I want to speak to you for a few minutes about the role of universities in our society. I’ve heard many people describe this in various ways and the approach I will take with you here today I first heard from Mike Lazaridis, the co-founder of RIM, maker of blackberries.

One hundred years ago, three key problems confronted the business leaders of New York City, then the fastest growing economy in the world. There were too few carriages and horses to maintain business growth and the horses they did have produced too much manure. Their best minds were devoted to opening these bottlenecks. They succeeded, but not in the expected ways: the car and truck came along.

In the meantime, however, the best minds in other fields, Albert Einstein for example, were considering fundamental questions about the structure of the universe. And researchers in the areas of the humanities and the social sciences were considering deep questions about our inner life as humans and the complex ways in which we interact. These bright minds, working on abstract problems with no immediately apparent applications, laid the foundations for our 21st century economy and our modern and increasingly tolerant society.

The fundamental work that we do today in our university in understanding the world around us and the world within us will build better worlds tomorrow, even though the relevance of that work may not yet be clear. We are solving the problems of tomorrow.

Of course, we also encourage our faculty, staff and students to solve the problems of today. We are devoting more resources to these efforts. We hold ourselves accountable to our communities and our societies. We want our university to be responsive to the needs of the society around us.

In order to guide and focus our work over the next 5 years we are developing a new strategic plan. This is a timely effort as we approach our 225th anniversary in 2010.

The strategic plan will focus on four areas, the first and most important of which concerns our students, because students come first at UNB.

Our plan will take the better part of a year to finalize. Many voices will be heard, inside and outside the university, to help us better understand our role in a changing New Brunswick and a changing world.

My own role in the development of this plan is mostly to listen, but there are a few issues of importance that I want us to consider. The first two are simple. I want us to do more to care for each other and the communities around us, and I want us to demand the best from each other.

If we succeed, then the rest of what we want to accomplish – taking our rightful place among the best universities, helping to build a greater province, a better country, a better world - will take care of itself.

You are going to hear me refer to entrepreneurship many times in the coming years. I want to be clear about what I believe this word to mean for us.

For me, entrepreneurs are those who create opportunities for themselves and for others, whether through business as the word is commonly understood, or through politics, social activism or any other of a myriad of worthwhile pursuits.

Each of our students has entrepreneurship potential and must be supported to develop those skills. My question for all of us is this: do we want to this to be a distinguishing feature of UNB?

I also want our university to consider ways and means to better respond to the needs of the communities around us.

As each of us enters a new chapter in our lives, as a new graduate or new president, we share the support of people who have touched us in special ways. In my case, my family has always been there for me. I cannot thank them enough, especially my darling wife Diane.

There are also three members of my family who cannot be with us here today to celebrate and I want to acknowledge the impact they had on me and how much they mean to me. They are my sister Darya who died at age 36 from breast cancer, my father, Jim, and my father-in-law Harold.

I miss them each and every day but I am comforted by the words I first heard when Diane’s grandmother died: “they live on in hearts that remember”. Those simple words have deep meaning for me and I will remember each of them in my heart.

All of us have special people who have helped us along the way. Remember them and celebrate them whenever you can. Never forget the people, the traditions, and the heritage that have influenced who you are today and who you will be tomorrow.

I want to acknowledge the extraordinary welcome we have had from the folks here in New Brunswick. Even before taking on this position as the 18th president of the University of New Brunswick, I had the honour of being introduced to the province by Premier Graham and Minister Arsenault on the floor of the provincial legislature. Boy, that was a great moment. Should the same opportunity come your way in the future, my friends, my advice to you is to do as I did, and show up accompanied by a national championship hockey team. That’s a fabulous way to make a great first impression.

All of these reasons have convinced us that we have made a great decision in moving here. Here is another. Those who knew Alison Webb, a fabulous student and former associate secretary of the university, gathered recently at a service in her memory. One of her professors in our department of political science, Thom Workman, spoke movingly of her as a truth-seeker, a person deeply motivated by a sense of intellectual curiosity, and a desire to challenge herself to grow and to learn.

He reminded us that a university is far more than a “job factory”, rather it is a place where we seek to understand ourselves and the world around us, a place where we aspire to change the world for the better.

The list of recent accomplishments at our university is impressive. Our research income growth is among the best in the country, we currently sit at 5th in the Maclean’s ranking, our fund-raising efforts lead Atlantic Canada, we have built exciting new programs and reached out to our partners in new ways. We have support from all three levels of government and sound arguments for increased support in order to achieve first-order goals for the people of the province. Our job is to consolidate those gains and to continue this amazing record of success. Even in these early days, I have found that the people of this university are determined to see us succeed.

By any account, this is a great place to be.

I began this speech talking to our graduates of 2009 and I would like to close by relaying what I hope will prove to be sound advice. When I first started to coach my children in hockey and soccer, I formulated two goals for them and their teammates: work hard and have fun. Over the years I came to realize that more was needed from them. Each of them had to try to make a difference to their team: making the pass that led to a goal; making the play that saved a goal; or scoring a goal. And so I asked each member of each team to do just that: work hard, have fun, make a difference.

I also came to realize that what I was asking of my children and their teammates applied equally well to me. So I will be working hard, having fun and doing my best to make a difference to UNB as its 18th President. I hope for the same of all of you in your roles as supporters and friends of New Brunswick and its university.

Citation: CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1962
JOSEPH LEONARD O'BRIEN
to be Doctor of Civil Law

Your Honour,

In presenting you for our degree I bid you accept its insignia as no idle symbol. Wear our scarlet as the badge of our affection and regard for one who, when prospering himself, has never neglected a less fortunate neighbour; who has served with unassuming aplomb in both Federal and Provincial parliaments; and who, devoted son, genial
companion, and staunch friend, would never countenance private claim on public duty.

In particular we esteem you as our Lieutenant-Governor. To this most august office you have brought a natural and befitting dignity, a noble bearing, and an admirable discretion.

You have been blessed with a life partner of comparable worth. In public she is a consort as gracious as yourself; in private -- true Christian that she is -- she is known to let no day go by without making someone happy.

Long may you, Sir, continue to be Her Majesty's Visitor to this University, and Mrs. O'Brien to vouchsafe us her lovable presence.

From:Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator.
Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.

Citations may be reproduced for research purposes only. Publication in whole or in part requires written permission
from the author.

This is a great honour conferred upon me today. I like to think it is a mark of approval for the aims I have been advocating for the betterment of this area of Canada – the Atlantic Provinces.

For me it was to have been an added source of happiness that the hood should be placed on my shoulders by your Chancellor, Lord Beaverbrook. For he has been my friend for forty years, for many of them my employer, and for all of them a major influence in my life. We are all bitterly disappointed at not seeing him today. We are glad that his illness is not severe, and we wish him a quick recovery.

The people of this Province owe much to him. He has been giving scholarships for fifty years and he has 58 of them running at the present time, 42 here in the University of New Brunswick. These and his buildings and endowments have had a marked effect on the prospects of many hundreds of young men and women.

Lady Dunn is another giver on a great scale. She is paying half the cost of the Theatre. She has provided priceless works of art for the Gallery. She has built the great new Science Building at Dalhousie and the Skating Rink at St. Andrews; she is giving 19 scholarships at the present time and she is making plans for the future. All these things she is doing in the name of Sir James Dunn, through The Sir James Dunn Foundation which she set up in his memory with an endowment of $7 million.

It is right that we should acknowledge our common debt, and it is right, too, that we should remember Sir James Dunn each time we are reminded of Lady Dunn’s benefactions. For that is the purpose of them, that they should keep his memory alive in our minds.

The gifts of the Art Gallery and the Theatre now in building have created a new intellectual environment. The young men and women of the Province will henceforth be wiser and wittier, more cultivated, more self-assured and happier – for enjoyment of the arts makes happiness.

The Theatre will be a centre for drama and music. It has been designed to provide for the full-size New Brunswick Symphony Orchestra and is being filled with all the devices and equipment necessary for the staging of plays. It will seat a thousand.

The Theatre will complement the Gallery in making this corner of New Brunswick a cultural centre of Canada. The Gallery is a thing of beauty to which people return again and again. It stands of the bank of the St. John River as a testimony to the conventional good taste and judgment of Maritimers and a refuge from the monstrous assault of abstract art which affront is elsewhere. It is the antithesis of that other new Gallery, the Guggenheim in New York which seems to be built upside down as a symbol of the artistic merits of the strange daubs of paint that disfigure its walls.

Fredericton is an enchanting city to live in.

The question is, how many of our young people will be able to live here?

In the past only half the graduates of U.N.B. who had resided in the region at the time of University enrollment have been able to make their lives here. There has been a net loss by migration from the Maritime Provinces of more than half a million people since Confederation, and the loss has been primarily in our adults who leave home in search of employment elsewhere.

We believe that losing our talented and educated youth is a tragedy and a crime, like the stealing of our most precious raw material. The flight from the Highlands of Scotland was a bitter and painful episode in history, a source of reproach and shame in memory. We see in the persistent loss of our young men and women a similar wrong that has debilitated and impoverished this region since Confederation.

We believe in the right of our young people to stay if they wish and make their living in the place where they belong, in the nearness of family and friends whose door is ever on the latch, and welcome ever ready on the lips.

It is this conviction that has led to the tremendous movement that has been gathering strength in the past decade to bring about a restitution and a regeneration in the region.

The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council came into being. The resources of economics and political science were brought into play. Under its president, Professor W. Y. Smith of U.N.B., a series of pointed arguments have been shaped and flung into the fray.

On another front, the Chignecto Canal Committee has been revised to restate the case for the Canal which was to have been constructed at the time of Confederation. The case for it has been fortified and modernised, and joined with a proposal for the development of the tidal power of Chignecto Bay. Three leading engineering firms were commissioned by Premier Louis J. Robichaud to report on the electric power potential of the monstrous tides that twice in every 24 hours smash and surge into the eastern extremity of the Bay of Fundy.

This vast profusion of power, driven like mighty battering rams into the Fundy bays and inlets, is at present wasted energy. Proposals have been made to harness to tides. Successful pioneering of tidal power development has been carried out in France and in Russia. It is certain that here in the Bay of Fundy almost limitless power can be generated at a cost comparable with the great hydro-electric installations elsewhere.

The complex of Chignecto is a prospect to excite the imagination. Transportation could be transformed through the development of coastal shipping that would make a busy channel out of a landlocked deadend. An abundance of cheap power, together with our winter ports, would make the Maritimes an ideal production area for processing not only our own plentiful raw materials but imported commodities also for re-export to world markets. The final planning of the Causeway linking New Brunswick with Prince Edward Island would be incorporated into the general design.

These are some of the great public works projects that have been asked for. Another is the Corridor Road through Maine, a new straight-line highway linking Vanceboro and Sherbrooke which would bring the Maritimes, in effect, 140 miles nearer to industrial Canada. There is support in the United States for the project and there is every reason to believe that it could be brought about by mutual effort of the two countries, to the benefit of both.

Other proposals have been made for methods and policies required to promote a higher rate of economic growth in the four Provinces. The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council has estimated that 155,000 new jobs will be needed by 1980. It has presented proposals to the four Premiers, and the four Premiers have in turn made their submission to the Government of Canada.

The program of development requires an agency dedicated to the task of promoting the economic development of the Atlantic region of Canada. The creation of an Atlantic Development Board became our prime demand. Its establishment was announced in the Speech from the Throne at the opening of Parliament last week.

We are, then, at a turning point in the history of the Maritimes. We are about to take a new course which will lead to a fair sharing of Canada’s heritage.

Let there be no doubt that there has been deep-seated injustice in the past. The Maritimes entered Confederation in 1867 with a standard of living that was higher than that of Canada, as Ontario and Quebec were named. Then came the end of the wooden sailing ships, bringing devastating losses to the Maritimes. The coup de grace was the national policy of tariffs in 1879. Ever since, the factories of Central Canada have thrived and the Maritimes have paid tribute to them in higher prices for everything their people buy, each purchase a subsidy to industrial Canada. It has been reckoned that the Atlantic Provinces spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in goods and services supplied from outside the region. The economists of the region are engaged in attempting to establish that figure. The taxable profits on this turnover make a considerable reckoning.

On the other hand, the Government of Canada spends something in the order of $170 million a year in aids and subsidies and insurance benefits which prop up the Atlantic economy but do nothing to increase productivity. All of this expenditure is lost without a trace by each year-end.

How much better, we have argued, to make massive investment in the area to increase productivity. Industry can be attracted to the region if certain prerequisites are carried out on the lines I have suggested. With new industry bringing employment and profit, annual payments in unemployment benefits and other aids could be curtailed. The new industries would pay taxes. The investment in the Atlantic region would be both wise and prudent. No other course is open. It is a reproach to Canada that the poverty of the Maritimes has been permitted to endure. I think perhaps it shocked me more than it does a native. Custom tends to blunt perception.

When I came here twelve years ago I was on a continuous tour of discovery. Having been much with Lord Beaverbrook in former years I had heard stories of the people of New Brunswick and the places, the rivers, the streams, and the forests. Instead of finding the host of Indian names queer, esoteric and unpronounceable, I found I knew them as old familiar friends. When Governor MacLaren reeled off his favorite rhyme of James de Mille about the river of New Brunswick that amazed his visitors from abroad, when he talked of the Sweet Maiden of Passamaquoddy, of how Miramichi waters are bluer, Restigouche pools are more black, how green is the bright Oromocto and brown the Petitcodiac, the names sounded in my ears as old friends of long ago. It is from these Lord Beaverbrook named his racehorses in the twenties. The cockney bookmakers had great sport with them as they shouted the odds against them.

I discovered the beauties of New Brunswick but I found too, a poverty more acute than anything I had seen elsewhere in my wanderings.

I knew the countryside of Britain and Europe. I had traveled in Asia and Africa and the Middle East.

Nowhere in the world, in my experience is the want so acute, the hardship so bitter, as in some areas of New Brunswick and the Maritimes, the region of rich cities and rural areas with standards near to starvation.

There are sectors where children are in actual want. Their fathers have no regular work, but eke out a few months with seasonal employment and spend the rest of the year on unemployment insurance and social assistance. Large families are living in inadequate housing with broken boards and tarred paper to keep out the sub-zero elements.

At a time when we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the Colombo Plan, for we rightly concern our social consciences about the lot of the people in Asia, our own people suffer more from want than the distant recipients of our alms in warmer climates.

When I ask for first things first, that we first put our own house in order, I am not suggesting that Canada should not be greatly concerned with world affairs. Canada’s voice of sanity was never more needed.

Canada is saying today something that is more vital than anything else in the world, something on which the very future of the world may depend. Hon. Howard Green, at the United Nations Assembly, has put Canada strongly behind the proposal that all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, under water and in outer space, should cease on January 1, 1963.

The alternative may be world destruction. The threat of World War is real and menacing. The world is spending $120 billion or more on war purposes. Much of the capital investments made in the world today are for war or defence against war. Mr. Khrushchov has put it at half the total capital investments of the world today.

This is a form of Public Works in Capitalist as well as in Communist countries. If we do not go over the brink, if the world turns from the path of destruction, to take the highway of life, there must be a gigantic redeployment of investment from the Public Works of Death to the Public Works of Life.

Then we might see the first international force of the best creative faculties of East and West made up of physicists, chemists, economists, geologists, engineers, oceanographers all bent on planning a better, happier, richer world.

For the new era of international collaboration, youth should take control. The elders have not made a success of international co-operation during my lifetime. I was born in a world at peace. My own generation was largely wiped out in the war that started 48 years ago and so far has had no ending.

Millions upon millions have been slaughtered in the wars of this century or in the gas chambers or by the famines caused by the wars.

We have armed ourselves with nuclear deterrents sufficient to destroy the world. Each man and woman and child on earth today had his allotted quota in the equivalent of 10 tons of T.N.T. per head. And the quota is fast growing.

We have polluted our rivers, contaminated our are, poisoned our earth. High altitude nuclear tests have filled the skies with radiation. Our forests and farms, potato fields and gardens are sprayed with insecticides and weed killers. Drains are filled with insoluble detergents. For good measure we put sodium fluoride into our public water supplies.

We have had warnings from our experts. Dr. Kerswill of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada has warned us that we shall kill our salmon. Bruce S. Wright, director if the Northeastern Wildlife Station, has said our woodcock are poisoned from eating poisoned earthworms. The current Book-of-the-Month is Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. She derives her title from Keat’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci:Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing. No birds sing because the birds are dead or moribund. On the morning that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, there was no sound. Only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh,

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silence the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

The book will be the best-seller, the literary sensation of the fall of 1962. Miss Carson will tell her lesson, as Harriet Beecher Stowe told hers a hundred years ago. The book will give its warning. But can we heed? Can we control the cornucopia of drugs by international collaboration any better than we control our lust for nuclear armaments? One would suppose that it would be simple to set up an international body to control the testing, naming, and licensing of drugs and, acting as a clearing house of information on them, recommend their uses. One might suppose that this might be good practice for the more exacting controls of disarmament. Yet the tragedy of the infants deformed through thalidomide not only showed that three months could elapse before information on the deadly threat passed from Western Germany to Canada, but that no effective international body could be set up afterwards.

In very truth, the world is out of control. The elders have failed. What a glorious opportunity for the young men and women, before they reach the age of complacency, to take hold, to clean up the mess, to lock up their elders, and to set the world to enjoying the fruits of science and technology that can abolish want, curtail work, and allow men to live in the image of God in a new age of international order, peace and happiness.

Arthur O’Connor is already one of us -– he holds the degree of Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from this University -– but is our custom, whenever we find men of signal merit, to bind them to our hearts with a double bond, "to honour them with our highest academic title, and to distinguish them with its insignia."

A native New Brunswicker he found Mary, his wife, on the banks of the Miramichi, and all their eight children claim various spots in this province as their birthplace. He has spent over thirty years with the New Brunswick Electric Power Commission in positions of ever increasing responsibility; since 1967 he has been its General Manager and in that role his major achievement has been to help this Province and its people survive, and even prosper, through an energy crisis which has shaken the very foundations of Canada and the world.

To do this he has moved this Province, out of its position of relative isolation in the North American power grid, into a full national and international partnership. New Brunswick with its limited conventional energy sources had no choice but to move with the times, but it is Art O’Connor who has kept it moving ahead of the times. He has done this with the prudent and responsible leadership always so critical when moving into untried areas and unknown territories.

I cannot this evening begin to list the executive positions which he has held in our national professional organizations, but I must note his latest distinction; he has been elected President of the Canadian National Committee of the World Energy Conference for 1983. Founded over half a century ago the "World Energy Conference is a permanent organization dedicated to the objective of promoting the development and peaceful use of energy resources to the greatest possible benefit both nationally and internationally." Less than a month ago he carried Canada’s colours in the Terry Fox run in New Delhi, where the meetings of the Conference were held this year. Closer to home he can be found on many evenings covering an eight kilometer route as he jogs up and down the hills of Fredericton.

Arthur O’Connor’s deep concern for the future and his passionate dedication to his job have brought our power commission "on line" with the rest of the world, and from that rest of the world, beyond our borders, he has brought back ideas and techniques which have enabled this Province to play a major role in cushioning the shocks of a wild ride on the roller coaster of energy costs. When pressed about his achievements this modest man consistently stresses the fact that none of these things could have been done without the dedication and skill of his fellow workers and NBPower, or without the tolerance and support of his family. This man loves his job, his Province, and his family, and it is right and proper that we should honour him tonight.

Arthur O’Connor, who received an honorary degree from the University of New Brunswick, told graduates he thinks this is a good time to be entering the job market.

Businesses are taking a fresh look at their future after going through tough times, he said.

"Business will need new technical and managerial inputs which can bring fresh ideas and a new zeal to a renewed economy," he told his audience of student graduating in engineering, business administration, physical education, secretarial studies, and education.

"This is the environment that awaits the new graduate and it offers a future quite different from the past."

It’s an environment that will "challenge the best in each of you."

His encouraging words were tempered, however, by a stern warning to graduates, governments, and industry leaders about what he said was an urgent need for investment in technology.

Time is running out for Canadians to embrace technology as a national priority, he said.

He told the graduates to "be wary of anyone who would hold back technology under whatever guise."

His concern is "very real and is one that must be addressed both socially and politically with some urgency."

Without greater emphasis on technology, the country’s economy will drift downward toward the level of the developing countries, he said.

In New Brunswick, technology offers new opportunities for expansion of small industry and has allowed promising advances in forest, food, metallurgy, shipping.

"The process is most important and must be accelerated."

He cited other countries where modern factories produce efficiently, unencumbered by "non-productive and restrictive work rules," and where employees take pride in setting new production records.

Such examples point the way to "our almost certain bleak future if we don’t get off our butts and quickly re-examine our strategy for the future."

Mr. O’Connor, who graduated from UNB in 1949 with an electrical engineering degree, lamented the fact that many New Brunswick graduates have left the province.

He said there’s a feeling in New Brunswick that "anything significant we undertake is likely to face failure."

That might discourage young graduates from staying in the province.

"There is a great need to develop a conviction within the province that success is possible."

As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the faculty of nursing at UNB, we are proud today to honour one of our own graduates who is making a significant contribution to nursing worldwide.

A native of Carleton County, Judith Oulton began her working life as an R.N., as a general duty nurse at Fredericton's Victoria Public Hospital. After upgrading to a B.N., she almost immediately became a lecturer in the faculty and then obtained a master's degree in education, also from UNB. It was while she was at UNB that she learned a valuable life lesson. It appears she and her husband Stuart had a dog with the nasty habit of running away. It fell to Judith to do the retrieving, and that was when she realized that if you want something done properly, you should do it yourself. She next spent several years with the provincial department of Health and Community Services culminating with the position of director of strategic planning. In 1981 she moved to Ottawa to become executive director of the Canadian Nurses Association for seven years, at the same time taking on the duties of CEO and secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Nurses Protective Society, and secretary-measurer of the Canadian Nurses Foundation. An even bigger move came in 1996 when she was chosen to be the CEO of the International Council of Nurses, based in Geneva, Switzerland. This is a federation of 130 national nurses' associations representing millions of nurses world-wide. Its achievements are numerous and impressive. Among them is the development of the Wellness Centre concept for care of health care workers and their families in sub-Saharan Africa, an idea hailed by the World Health Organization and the Stephen Lewis Foundation as the most innovative approach to date to keep health-care workers healthy and in the workplace.
Another successful initiative has been the first campaign against counterfeit drugs.

fever one to take on just one large task at a time, Dr. Oulton is simultaneously the CEO and secretary of the Florence Nightingale International Foundation (which supports, among other things, the Girl Child Education Fund for the education of orphaned daughters of nurses in four African countries); the CEO of the International Centre on Human Resources in Nursing; and the co-director of the International Centre on Nursing Migration based in Philadelphia. In fact these last two are her own initiatives.

As you might expect, her role requires considerable international travel, but the number of talks she has delivered is quite staggering: In 10 years she has given 67 lectures from Japan to South America to Europe. Her expertise has been called upon by various other international bodies, among the most notable being the World Health Organization for n which she has been a technical advisor and a member of task forces on many issues. She was a Canadian representative to the World Health Assembly on four occasions and represents the International Council of Nurses within the UN system. On top of all this, Dr. Oulton has authored 20 articles in the last 10 years, and contributed close to 50 editorials in The International Nursing Review.

Those who know Dr. Oulton praise her patient-focused nursing style, which has carried over to a strong desire to improve the lives and working conditions of nurses both nationally and internationally so that they can indeed give their patients the best possible care.

Despite her high profile career, she is described as down-to-earth and a person who values her friendships. She exemplifies the potential for nurses and, as a graduate of the University of New Brunswick, she serves as a role model for current and future generations of nurses.

Dr. Oulton has previously received honorary degrees from McMaster University in Hamilton in 1996, and the Edmundston Campus of l'Université de Moncton in 2007. We are honoured to join with them in awarding her with this degree today.

From: Honoris Causa, UA Case 70

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from the author.

Chancellor Currie, President McLaughlin, members of the faculty, board of governors, distinguished guests, graduates, families and friends.

It is with much pleasure that I participate in this ceremony today and enjoy the privilege of speaking to the graduates of the class of 2008. As a nurse, a UNB graduate and former faculty member, I am delighted to receive this recognition on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the faculty of nursing. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate current and past staff, and to acknowledge the faculty’s growth and achievements.

You, the graduates, today celebrate another milestone in your journey—one much bigger than those that have gone before—both traumatic ones, such as your first day of kindergarten, and those headier ones, such as getting your driver’s licence and graduating from high school. But today is different. Remember all those times when you wanted something or to do something and your parents said: "wait until you are an adult; or wait until you are on your own". Well, for many of you that day is here. And, if it is like mine was, it is wonderful; it is exciting—but it is a bit scary.

There are good reasons to be a bit scared—the world beyond this campus is going through some tough times. We face several global crises, both current and looming—not the least of which relate to energy, climate, pandemic influenza and a growing food shortage. On this very day 10, 000 people are dying of under-nutrition as will another 10, 000 each day of this year. Yet here in Canada we have the issue of obesity and increasing lifestyle related illnesses. One in three Ontario residents, for example, has at least one chronic disease. And, unless we make some drastic changes, your generation will follow suit.

My travels show me the impact of this and other crises; HIV being one example. Swaziland, the tiny kingdom many consider a bedroom community of South Africa, has an HIV rate of nearly 40%. Life expectancy is 32 years and there are nearly 70,000 AIDS orphans in this little kingdom.

Africa is a continent we are failing in many ways, but one from whose people I have learned much. And, indeed, they exemplify much of what I wish for you today. Against incredible odds, they exemplify hope, a faith in themselves and each other, and a deep sense of community.

You step from this platform today with choice, privilege and promise, and with the best wishes of faculty, family and friends who have taught, nurtured and supported you. They see in you, the Y generation, the most educated generation in history. You are equally known as the Net generation, the first to grow up immersed in a digital and Internet driven world.

We look at you and see a promising future.

Your generation has high expectations of yourselves and your employers. This bodes well for all of us, as does the fact that

You value ongoing learning, seek out creative challenges, and view colleagues as vast resources from whom to gain knowledge. You exemplify the strategy that every developed and developing country is pursuing—that of creating a value added, knowledge based, expert led economy.

You are goal oriented and want to make immediate impact (I suspect this reflects the net-led instant gratification syndrome).

You are not afraid to challenge the status quo and this I greatly admire.

You value family and want your jobs to accommodate family and personal lives.

You care about the environment. And,

For you, there is more to life than work.

The characteristics of your generation are indeed what are needed now. Some would call you brash. I think you need to be bold, audacious, and have many mavericks among you.

I also ask you to be analytical rather than cynical. The fact that you question the status quo is good. You need though to be reasoned and logical and offer plausible solutions. Being sceptical, suspicious, or scornful impedes relationships and progress. Working, as you will do, alongside colleagues more than twice your age will be a challenge. I have had terrific role models and some discouraging cynics in my work life. Be patient and have them learn from you as you learn from them.

I implore you to have a sense of community. Valuing personal achievement and family is not enough.

The next decade will see increasing globalisation, with emerging markets, such as China and India, taking a greater slice of the economy. We will see more products and services targeted at the ageing populations, and workforces become older and more female. The boundaries between different functions, organisations and even industries will blur. And, as automation increases, personal relationships will become more important. Collaboration and cross functional work, cross border work and inter-organisational partnerships will proliferate. The ability to communicate, to solve problems and to lead will be more important to organisations’ success than functional and technical capabilities.

This scenario fits you well. You leave today with an obligation to model what you have learned. Much of the world is struggling with chaos, but you are now equipped to handle much of what you will confront. These may be crazy times but they are also opportunistic ones. I won’t pretend life is easy. I believe, however, that your life experiences and your education have given you an edge – use it – for the future is not a gift, but an achievement.

I am sure each speaker is inclined to offer the advice of their experience. Mine is simple: I implore you to:
Keep an open mind;
Continue to learn;
Work at something you love,
Have faith in yourselves and each other,
Collaborate; and cultivate your community.
Aim high, have fun and heed this African proverb:
Tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

You are our tomorrow—I join all others here in wishing each of you a healthy and fulfilled future.

Your Honour, Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Governors, Mr. President, guests, ladies and gentlemen, and graduates.

I'd like to begin by telling you what an honour it is for me to be standing up here in front of you as your valedictorian.

The University of New Brunswick has been very good to me over my past five years, and it is truly exciting to be allowed to say goodbye by standing on a stage, with the Aitken Centre sound system and a captive audience.

Today I have the privilege of being surrounded by graduates of the faculty of arts, nursing and Renaissance College. Only the name of one of those faculties actually outlines a specific career path. No, Renaissance College, it's not you. But in planning what I would say to you today, I didn't focus on our differences (and believe me, there are differences) but instead on what binds us together.

You may be thinking that there is little that binds you to the person next to you, unless they're sitting on your robe. In many ways we thrive on our independence and university liberates us in a way that high school never could.

We can rent an apartment, take out loans, take out more loans, get credit cards, pull all nighters, eat food we were forbidden to when we were younger and wear improper clothing. Case in point, the undisputed fact that a pub crawl t-shirt is adequate clothing to get from campus to downtown no matter the time of year.

We do things for ourselves, by ourselves. But despite the increase in freedoms that have defined our university careers, our increase in independence is nothing compared to our increased awareness of a world outside of our own.

I'd like to try a bit of an experiment. Graduates, I'd like you to close your eyes. Now I want you to think, has someone helped you to achieve the goal of sitting in this room today?

Over the past three, four, five, or more years, has someone been there at the exact right moment to revitalize you, challenge you, pick you up when you needed it most, or provided some sort of support that you needed to continue through the pursuit of higher education.
If you can think of at least one person, or people, who made a real difference to you, keep your eyes closed and raise your hand. Now leave your hands up, open your eyes and look around. That is how many of us are here because of the support of others.

We are here, graduating from university, a feat that I know helps us to become better people. Thus, we have become better people because of the support of others. Now if there's a specific person in your mind, I want you to think if you've ever told that person what they did for you.

There are people I've barely spoken to who have altered my life in such significant ways that I know that, without them, I would not be speaking in front of you today. Because I remember what they did for me, I know the power that a single individual has to influence the life of another person.

But it's not just about the support you've been given, it's about the support that you have given out. I know that the people in this room have performed what to them are insignificant deeds in passing that made a difference in the lives of other students at this university. Don't think so?

Let's take one example: Orientation Week. Or, for the many new students to UNB, it might be considered: l-don't'-think-l want-to-do-this-week, or why-does-my-hall-proctor-have-a-mullet-week, or what-do-you-mean-the-south-gym-is-at-the-top-of-the-hill week.
Many of the people sitting in this room were orientation leaders in some form. You were peer mentors, campus tour guides, recruitment volunteers, tutors, redshirts, HOC, the list goes on. What is frequently seen by the leaders as a great week to start off the year is paramount to the new students arriving. And what may have been thought of by you as the most insignificant gesture may have dramatically influenced someone's life.

A friend of mine, Drew, was an orientation leader at his university. On the first day of Orientation Week, all of the new students were lined up with their parents to register. Drew was raising awareness for Shinerama, our fight against Cystic Fibrosis, and was handing out candy and stickers to the new arrivals. He stopped alongside a boy standing nervously with his parents in front of a girl with her parents. He handed a lollipop to the guy, pointed to the girl standing in line in front of him, who was a complete stranger, and said "why don't you give this pretty girl the lollipop?"

Like all first year students, the boy blushed, looked at his shoes, and begrudgingly gave the girl the candy. My friend, and orientation leader, then turned to the girl's parents and said "she's barely left the house, and already she's taking candy from strangers". That girl approached my friend Drew, four years later, as she was about to graduate. She explained that she was from out of town, and that day in line, she was this close to asking her parents to let her go home.
She said she didn't think she'd fit in. She said that Drew's comment got such a laugh that it provided an opportunity to break the ice, open up and realize that she was going to have a great time. Finally, she told him that she and the boy had been dating for four years. An episode that Drew had forgotten had affected this girl's life more than he'd ever known.

Why am I telling these stories? Why I am I talking about people who matter to you?

Because, students of nursing, Renaissance College and arts, I think that human connection and compassion are the attributes that we need to put at the forefront of our lives. And I think that our time at university has demonstrated that we are good at it. Social events are one way we demonstrate human connections and are all great memories.
But what about our other accomplishments? Our varsity athletes working hard to excel both physically and mentally, mature students who have chosen to return to university while supporting busy families at home, our residence system bonding together in hard times. What about the orientation programs I mentioned earlier that included peer mentoring, HOC, Redshirts and Townhouse leaders?
These students volunteered their time, usually leaving summer jobs early to come back to UNB to help welcome new students. Renaissance College students have taken part in incredible internship programs that see them volunteering in developing nations.

And finally, what about the staggering amount of money that has been fundraised on this campus for our various causes? UNB, we should be proud of our successes and our involvement in philanthropy. We have participated in events that have seen us get up early and stay out late, working closely with the community to contribute to causes that we see as important.

Our education at UNB is invaluable in the way that it has opened our eyes to issues around the world. In personal experience, my education has had me asking more questions than I could find answers. It has humbled me in the realization of how much effort it takes to become truly knowledgeable and has reminded me that learning is a life-long process; not one that can be accomplished in a few short years.
What it has done, however, is that it has shaped me to the person I am today. The classroom has helped me to form the opinions and beliefs that I carry with me beyond the hill. The process of leaving this tight-knit university community is both incredibly heart breaking and unbelievably exciting.

I think that if we can do one thing to repay the people who helped us to get here today, it's to be those people for others in the future. One person at a time, if we can provide a bit of support imagine the impact the people in this room could have.

If graduation means that we leave the microcosm of a university community for the world at large, then surely we can increase our impact to staggering levels. It is not our final destination that is important, but how we carry ourselves along the journey that will let us reminisce at the end of our lives with the same sense of pride we have today.

"As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn't see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more."
- Neil Young

It is rare indeed for us to award honorary degrees simultaneously to two people, but it makes a good deal of sense for us to do so this year as Joe and Arlene Pach retire after 29 years as UNB's Resident Musicians. The Duo Pach, as we have come to know them, have been a remarkable partnership. Two highly talented musicians, Arlene and Joe decided many years ago to make music together, both as partners in a musical enterprise and as husband and wife. Their professional goal was to build a performing career on the basis of the enormously rich piano-violin repertoire. While in the end they were to accomplish much more than this, it was as a performing duo that they began and ended their unique relationship with UNB.

The Duo Pach has always been an equal partnership. As in sonata playing which has been their specialty, there is a time for each player to shine and others when the role must be supportive. The partners are alike in that each has been endowed with a high level of talent, virtuosic skill, and artistic commitment. On the other hand, each has brought something special to the relationship. Of the two, Arlene is the organizer, a thoughtful and disciplined person. Before she was part of the duo, she had extensive educational and performing experience which clearly established her credentials as a rising star among Canadian musicians. At the age of 18, she performed the challenging Mendelssohn Piano Concerto. She went on to perform in recitals and as guest soloist with chamber orchestras in several parts of Canada, she studied in Vancouver, Banff, and Lausanne, Switzerland, and she taught at music schools and as a private teacher. As a young adult, she worked briefly as a music columnist and also as a music critic for the CBC.

Joe, for his part, is witty, good-humoured, and free-spirited. A violinist's tone is what he makes it, and it can tell you a lot about the person. In Joe's case the tone is lush, romantic, and intense. Joseph Pach grew up in Toronto where, as a junior virtuoso, he dazzled crowds with gold-medal performances at the Canadian National Exhibition. At 18, he performed the monumental Tschaikovsky violin concerto with the Toronto Symphony. He embarked on a national and international performing career with an artist's diploma from the University of Toronto.

Together, the Duo Pach have performed for audiences all over Canada and Europe. Among the highlights of their early career together, they won the duo competition at the 9th International Munich Radio Competition. With this prestigious recognition, they embarked on an extended tour of the British Isles and West Germany, and then, in 1964, a coast-to-coast tour of Canada sponsored by the Canada Council. This tour brought them to UNB for the first time, and it was on the basis of their performance here that they were invited to become Artists-in-Residence. No one, least of all the Pachs, could have imagined that they would remain to develop their careers here. But because they did stay, the cultural life of UNB and of the larger New Brunswick community has been transformed by their artistic presence.

While there are many ways of describing their contribution, two stand out. First, the Duo educated us; they expanded our musical horizons. The Pachs came to a community which had no extended experience with chamber music, no regular exposure to the sonata literature, and no appreciation of the vast cultural heritage which this literature represents. The Pachs changed that. They educated a public, here at UNB and throughout New Brunswick. Later, when Joe decided to create a string quartet, the range of what they offered more than doubled. Both the duo and the quartet brought the sounds of the royal courts of Europe to Memorial Hall and to classrooms around the campus. They played Mozart and Beethoven to students carrying brown-bag lunches. They made familiar a mode of expression unique for its intimacy, transparency, and personal intensity. Larger centres had their symphony orchestras, but UNB had its chamber music and an audience that grew to love it.

If educating a public was simply part of the job, there was a second quality to the Pachs' contribution that was beyond the call of duty. This was their generosity. By this, one does not mean simply their hospitality, which among visiting artists was legendary, but more profoundly the generosity of the musician, the generosity that allows our Canadian society to pay musicians far less than they are worth, while enjoying the fruits of their talent and accomplishment. The Pachs shared generously, and they brought to us other musicians who also shared generously. One thinks particularly of Arlene's marvellous summer festival known as "Chamber Music and all that Jazz." For 18 summers, leading musicians from all over Canada came to Fredericton to enjoy making music together, and to let us hear them doing it.

Today we celebrate less a retirement than a lasting legacy. The Pachs have enriched the cultural life of our community with their music, their grace, and their artistry, and for this we will always be grateful. Fortunately for us all, they plan to continue to record and to perform in what is really only a semi-retirement. We wish them every future happiness and success.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 3

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from the author.

It is our great pleasure to welcome back UNB's first woman president and vice-chancellor who served here with distinction from 1996 to 2002. She came to us with an impressive background in business, government service, and university administration, and with impeccable academic credentials in economics. Yet she wore all of her achievements lightly, insisted that we just call her "Liz," and turned to the serious business of guiding this University with a warmth and affability that became her trademark for the six years of her tenure.

Her unassuming style was a bonus, behind which lurked a sharp mind and a most impressive resume. She was born in New York City, earned the bachelor of arts degree with honours and election to Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley College; and received master's and doctoral degrees in economics from Yale. She moved to Canada in the late sixties to teach at Huron College and the University of Western Ontario, and soon thereafter became a Canadian citizen. She continued with teaching positions at the University of British Columbia and Carleton. She then held a number of senior appointments with the federal government, as a senior policy advisor, director of economic development analysis for DREE, and senior analyst with Stats Canada. For ten years, she held senior executive-level positions in the private sector, as a senior policy analyst for Inco and manager of products strategic systems for Shell Canada. Before coming to UNB, she served as president of Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, where she was also chair of the Council of Nova Scotia University Presidents. Over the years, she has served as a director of several major companies and as a member or governor of numerous academic bodies.

For all of that, Liz and her husband Archie, who is a native of Prince Edward Island, preferred the simple life of the Maritimes. They brought with them to Fredericton a down-home style that took a few people here off guard. Not long after they moved into the president's house on Waterloo Row, Liz phone up a local take-out and asked them to deliver a pizza. When he heard the address, the guy on the other end was certain that this must be a student playing a practical joke. He had no intention of sending out the order until Liz convinced him that, indeed, Liz and Archie were ordinary mortals who happened to like pizza. After that initiation, Liz was ready for whatever came her way.

We have simply to look about us to see that Liz made a significant difference as president. During her tenure, the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre was completed; a new wing was added to the Biomedical Engineering Building; and the Maggie Jean Chestnut House - once abandoned as a residence - was given a new lease on life as Renaissance College which itself was an innovative approach to leadership training. Her role as a builder continued when she helped in convincing the federal government to locate its new e-commerce research centre here on the Fredericton campus, in recognition of the University's excellence in computer science. To her accomplishments here, we must add her impressive record as UNB's ambassador across Canada and around the world. She visited alumni chapters in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Ireland, the United States, and from coast to coast in Canada. One of the direct benefits of her outreach was the significant increase in the number of foreign students on both the Fredericton and Saint John campuses, enriching our cultural life and redefining our mission as the University of choice for people from many lands. She brought prestige to UNB by serving on national bodies, carrying the message of the value of higher education to the highest levels while pressing both federal and provincial governments for a greater financial commitment. Whether speaking for UNB or for all universities and colleges in Canada, the message was clear and consistent: it was that public investment in higher education is an investment in excellence, without which neither our province or country can compete in global markets or the free trade of ideas.

As an economist, Liz brought to her presidency a penchant for clearly articulated goals. She led the University in defining a new mission statement. She chaired the Senate, carefully balancing efficiency with collegiality. She responded quickly when students raised concerns about campus safety and the treatment of women, and she advanced the place of women faculty and students by insisting on full equality and by bringing more women into the ranks of administration. She remained a constant advocate for students, raising money for scholarships while confronting rising costs and the difficult challenge of holding tuition fees as low as possible. Importantly, she has continued the work she began as president in identifying potential donors to the University, only recently helping land the largest private donation ever received by this institution in the form of the Dr. William Lewis Scholarships for doctoral studies.

Liz served UNB with distinction and grace. To our great satisfaction, she now becomes more than past-president as she joins the ranks of UNB's honorary graduates. Before retiring to their dream home on the shores of beautiful Chester Basin, she and Archie won for themselves a permanent place in our affections. We welcome them back today, and wish them both the fullest measure of happiness in their retirement.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 4

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from the author.

Your Honour, Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President, faculty, graduands, families, ladies and gentlemen. To be recognized by the very institution I had the honour to serve for six wonderful, challenging years is a singular honour. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generosity and exceedingly kind remarks. If only half of them are true, I am a fortunate woman indeed! Today as you have learned is UNB’s 175th Encaenia and it is a privilege and pleasure to become one of the graduates 2004!

Being on the other side of the ceremony however is a bit unsettling. For the years I served as President, I was the one conducting the ceremonies and now suddenly I find myself being the one honoured. Honestly I think it is easier to assume the ceremonial role and maintain relative anonymity. Spotlights have always unnerved me. Nonetheless I am deeply honoured and greatly pleased. Thank you all.

Encaenia is a very special day for us all. In the case of you, the graduating students, this marks the culmination of many years of effort, dedication and devotion to your studies. You have wisely made a significant investment in your future and are paused to reap your just rewards. As a group, we now become part of the body of almost 60,000 alumni with a lifelong and proud attachment to the University of New Brunswick with its rich and colourful history and enduring tradition of academic strength and excellence. Today we celebrate you, our graduates, your achievements and substantial accomplishments and we assure you that you have the ability to do or be whatever you dare. Today you have no restraints, no limits – it is your day and your future. Enjoy it.

My immediate task is to address Encaenia. Years of experience have taught me that the best message is a short one – something you can take with you and perhaps ponder later when the excitement of the moment has waned. Short, simple and to the point is always appropriate!

To do this, I mulled over a host of academic and business topics but instead, I decided to issue a challenge for the future. Specifically I urge you to dedicate part of yourself to making a difference – for other, for the environment, for public policy, for education, for music, or in just about any area where you can make a personal difference. If you haven’t done so already, find an activity or cause about which you can be passionate and involved, something where the application of your time and talent can make a true difference for others. We are all busy people and it is all too easy to attend to current demands and obligations. But this new investment is critical.

Let me set a bit of background for this challenge. Recently my husband, Archie, and I were extremely fortunate in being able to travel to Africa where we visited our daughter and her family in Malawi and went on to spend almost three incredible weeks in the immensely beautiful country of South Africa. It was, in all its aspects, an amazing voyage. It would take me days to tell you about all that we saw and learned. But several examples of people making a difference stand out.

Some seven years ago, our son-in-law and daughter pulled up stakes and moved to Malawi where Dr. Chris Brooks fulfilled a lifelong dream of establishing a medical clinic where local medical facilities are non-existent, to provide often lifesaving medical services for a people with minimal resources and a vast joy of life.

Chris and Heather have done just that by building a clinic in a remote area called Ngodzi on the shore of Lake Malawi where there exists neither running water nor electricity. Through their organization named Lifeline Malawi, they have funded and constructed several clinic buildings including an examination and treatment building where three nurses and Chris, the doctor, offer medical services to a steady stream of patients, many of whose primary illness is AIDS. It is stressful, exhausting and yet exhilarating. They plan to continue and expand Lifeline Malawi. In all respects, they and those who work with them are people who are making a difference. In their case, they have turned their lives upside down to save and improve lives and will go on doing it as long as they are able. I couldn’t do it, but thank God they are!

Then on to incredibly beautiful South Africa where we first visited game reserves that have preserved previously endangered species to the point where elephants, lions, cape buffalo, hippopotamus, and leopards among many other roam freely and in abundance. Magnificent awe inspiring animals roaming freely across the low veldt! While this is now clearly commercially advantageous, the initial efforts to protect the species came from recognition of an environmental threat and a desire to reverse that situation.

But the undeniable highlight of the trip was to be in South Africa on April 14th to experience the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the constitution which extended full democratic rights to all South Africans and to witness their national election being held peacefully and effectively. In all respects, this was democracy in action. People walked many kilometers to their local polling station and waited patiently in long lines and in their best clothes to exercise their hard earned right to vote. These are people who care deeply and were justifiably proud of exercising their vote.

If you had read Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Former President Nelson Mandela or Crying in the Wilderness: The Struggle for Justice in South Africa by Bishop Desmond Tutu and others, you will have a sense of the enormity of the challenge. But until you see what this vast nation has accomplished in 10 short years and the hope and faith they hold for the future, you cannot fully appreciate the incredible achievement. True, far more is needed, but so very much ahs been accomplished and the pride South Africans’ have in their nation and their democratic rights is infectious. (Indeed we Canadians could use a good measure of such enthusiasm about now.) In all respects, those involved in the recent history of South Africa have made a real difference and are continuing to do so. I salute them.

Bringing this back to Canada and New Brunswick, our challenge is appreciably smaller and in my view eminently more achievable. It beings with thinking about ourselves a bit less often (but never thinking less of ourselves) and dedicating a portion of our lives to giving back to others. I promise you that a small initial effort will expand as you learn the joy of making a difference for others. Whether it be working for a political cause, becoming active in UNB’s Associated Alumni (a great thing to do), supporting a society for emotionally disturbed youth, volunteering at a food bank, or supporting an immense number of other organizations that could benefit from your involvement, being to "put back" or "give back" to the very society that has nurtured you – if indeed you are not doing so already. Make it a lifetime habit and experience the joy of making a difference for others.

Thank you for this singular honour. Being an official graduate of UNB means the world to me. I salute you, our graduates one and all and I wish you great success and joy in the future. I am honoured to be amongst you.

Gordon Petrie was born in Montreal and entered UNB as a Beaverbrook Scholar in 1958, thus beginning a long association with this university. After graduating with a B.A. he continued into Law, graduating with the Lieutenant-Governor’s silver medal in 1964. He completed his university education by obtaining a masters of laws degree from the University of Michigan the following year.

Gordon Petrie has been a partner in several law firms in Fredericton over the years and is currently a senior partner in Stewart McKelvey. He has appeared before all levels of courts in New Brunswick, before the Supreme Court of Canada, and at various federal and provincial administrative tribunals and arbitration boards. His specialty is labour and employment law and it is said that his hand can be seen in virtually every significant case and piece of legislation in New Brunswick in these areas over the past 30 years.

For the past 35 years Gordon has been the University Solicitor for UNB, acting often in matters of employment law, but in a wide range of other matters as well such as issues involving property, construction, copyright, human rights, and pensions. He has thus acquired a second area of expertise, and in fact he was a founding member of the Canadian Association of University Solicitors. His success at UNB can perhaps be measured not by the number of court cases won but rather by way his expert advice and negotiating skills have avoided the need to proceed to court at all. He is known as tough but fair with the ability to listen carefully and probe deeply. His fierce loyalty to UNB can produce sometimes colourful language but he also frequently displays a dry wit to balance any heated discussion. One adversary commented to a Petrie family member that they felt quite intimidated when facing Gordon. The family
member replied with surprise, saying that really he was just a teddy bear. The reply came back "Yes, perhaps, but then he must be a grizzly teddy bear!"

Gordon was made a Queen's Counsel in 1984 and has served on a wide variety of committees of the law Society of New Brunswick, as well as the Canadian Human Rights Appeal Tribunal. He has lectured at UNB, and is a member of the Advisory Panel of the Canadian Law & Employment Law Journal. One of his most prestigious honours was to be one of the first Fredericton lawyers to be invited to be a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Gordon has been a generous supporter of UNB and in particular our faculty of law, both as an individual and as a leader in his firm.

Although Gordon is partial to a game of golf now and then, he shows little interest in retirement. The law and his family are his two main loves, followed by his fondness for "double doubles." He is a current affairs junkie, revelling in the give and take of debate on the issues of the day.

UNB is proud to honour one of our own graduates who has given exemplary service both to his profession and to this university.

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What a great privilege and an honour it is to be addressing my first group of UNB graduates in my new role as president.

My wife Diane, my daughter Maggie and I are thrilled to be in New Brunswick and are settling into our new home. Maggie is attending high school, learning alongside hundreds of students who will come to UNB to further their education upon graduation.

Although this day includes an installation ceremony, it is first and foremost about our graduates. I would like to begin by offering them a few words of advice.

Graduates, one of the most important factors in your future success is to have a passion for your work. It is our goal that your experiences here will lead you to a career that makes you want to bounce out of bed in the morning ready to change the world.

But passion must be coupled to purpose. Your purpose, as alumni of UNB, should be to take that corner of the world in which you find yourself and make it better.

There will be obstacles. You will make mistakes. Be persistent and believe in yourself. Refuse to take no for an answer. Pave the way for those who follow you just as our alumni have paved the way for you.

Take pride in everything that you do, and ensure that all you do is worthy of that pride. Never underestimate the power you have as an individual to make a difference. Be proudly UNB.

Passion, purpose, persistence, pride: these are the building blocks of success in everything you do.

Each one of you chose UNB for a reason. I hope we have met your expectations. If we did, please go home and tell all of your friends and family. If we did not, talk to me and I’ll try to have it fixed. Your degree from UNB IS important and special.

A global economic recession is upon us, yet our friends continue to make supporting UNB a priority. In addition to remarkable recent gifts from individuals like Eldon and Maxine Clair of Florenceville, Violet Woodroffe of Saint John, Warren McKenzie and Julia MacLauchlan of Seattle and Dave and Wendy Betts of Calgary, we have also witnessed tremendous support from three levels of government, including more than $59 million from our provincial government for capital projects alone.

Their support has enabled:

•Our partnership with Dalhousie University to offer a medical education program in Saint John;
•Our partnership with the New Brunswick Community College;
•The refurbishment of the Canada Games Stadium in Saint John, and;
•The construction of the University Commons in Saint John.

As well we have the landmark Richard J. CURRIE CENTER in Fredericton, which has also been made possible through the great generosity of our Chancellor.

What an impressive list! To our donors and friends, many of whom are here today, I say thank you for putting our students first.

UNB is attracting talented and energetic new individuals and groups to join us in building a self-sufficient New Brunswick. Our recruitment activities bring hundreds of new students into the province every year all of whom are potential residents, investors and advocates.

The focus we are demonstrating with regard to a renewed and vigorous research agenda is creating new opportunities within our province.

We are fortunate to have the working relationship we do with our student government and governments. In addition to the support for the capital projects referenced earlier, we have seen much increased support for our students, for deferred maintenance, and for the community colleges. There is significant new targeted funding towards the goals set out in the province’s post-secondary action plan. Each of these initiatives involves many millions of dollars and each is deserving of our gratitude.

There is one important area where continuing investment is needed and that is our operating grant. Our provincial government’s bold vision is to build the best post-secondary system in the country. We have had strong support from our Premier and Minister to date and I know that will continue.

I want to speak to you for a few minutes about the role of universities in our society. I’ve heard many people describe this in various ways and the approach I will take with you here today I first heard from Mike Lazaridis, the co-founder of RIM, maker of blackberries.

One hundred years ago, three key problems confronted the business leaders of New York City, then the fastest growing economy in the world. There were too few carriages and horses to maintain business growth and the horses they did have produced too much manure. Their best minds were devoted to opening these bottlenecks. They succeeded, but not in the expected ways: the car and truck came along.

In the meantime, however, the best minds in other fields, Albert Einstein for example, were considering fundamental questions about the structure of the universe. And researchers in the areas of the humanities and the social sciences were considering deep questions about our inner life as humans and the complex ways in which we interact. These bright minds, working on abstract problems with no immediately apparent applications, laid the foundations for our 21st century economy and our modern and increasingly tolerant society.

The fundamental work that we do today in our university in understanding the world around us and the world within us will build better worlds tomorrow, even though the relevance of that work may not yet be clear. We are solving the problems of tomorrow.

Of course, we also encourage our faculty, staff and students to solve the problems of today. We are devoting more resources to these efforts. We hold ourselves accountable to our communities and our societies. We want our university to be responsive to the needs of the society around us.

In order to guide and focus our work over the next 5 years we are developing a new strategic plan. This is a timely effort as we approach our 225th anniversary in 2010.

The strategic plan will focus on four areas, the first and most important of which concerns our students, because students come first at UNB.

Our plan will take the better part of a year to finalize. Many voices will be heard, inside and outside the university, to help us better understand our role in a changing New Brunswick and a changing world.

My own role in the development of this plan is mostly to listen, but there are a few issues of importance that I want us to consider. The first two are simple. I want us to do more to care for each other and the communities around us, and I want us to demand the best from each other.

If we succeed, then the rest of what we want to accomplish – taking our rightful place among the best universities, helping to build a greater province, a better country, a better world - will take care of itself.

You are going to hear me refer to entrepreneurship many times in the coming years. I want to be clear about what I believe this word to mean for us.

For me, entrepreneurs are those who create opportunities for themselves and for others, whether through business as the word is commonly understood, or through politics, social activism or any other of a myriad of worthwhile pursuits.

Each of our students has entrepreneurship potential and must be supported to develop those skills. My question for all of us is this: do we want to this to be a distinguishing feature of UNB?

I also want our university to consider ways and means to better respond to the needs of the communities around us.

As each of us enters a new chapter in our lives, as a new graduate or new president, we share the support of people who have touched us in special ways. In my case, my family has always been there for me. I cannot thank them enough, especially my darling wife Diane.

There are also three members of my family who cannot be with us here today to celebrate and I want to acknowledge the impact they had on me and how much they mean to me. They are my sister Darya who died at age 36 from breast cancer, my father, Jim, and my father-in-law Harold.

I miss them each and every day but I am comforted by the words I first heard when Diane’s grandmother died: “they live on in hearts that remember”. Those simple words have deep meaning for me and I will remember each of them in my heart.

All of us have special people who have helped us along the way. Remember them and celebrate them whenever you can. Never forget the people, the traditions, and the heritage that have influenced who you are today and who you will be tomorrow.

I want to acknowledge the extraordinary welcome we have had from the folks here in New Brunswick. Even before taking on this position as the 18th president of the University of New Brunswick, I had the honour of being introduced to the province by Premier Graham and Minister Arsenault on the floor of the provincial legislature. Boy, that was a great moment. Should the same opportunity come your way in the future, my friends, my advice to you is to do as I did, and show up accompanied by a national championship hockey team. That’s a fabulous way to make a great first impression.

All of these reasons have convinced us that we have made a great decision in moving here. Here is another. Those who knew Alison Webb, a fabulous student and former associate secretary of the university, gathered recently at a service in her memory. One of her professors in our department of political science, Thom Workman, spoke movingly of her as a truth-seeker, a person deeply motivated by a sense of intellectual curiosity, and a desire to challenge herself to grow and to learn.

He reminded us that a university is far more than a “job factory”, rather it is a place where we seek to understand ourselves and the world around us, a place where we aspire to change the world for the better.

The list of recent accomplishments at our university is impressive. Our research income growth is among the best in the country, we currently sit at 5th in the Maclean’s ranking, our fund-raising efforts lead Atlantic Canada, we have built exciting new programs and reached out to our partners in new ways. We have support from all three levels of government and sound arguments for increased support in order to achieve first-order goals for the people of the province. Our job is to consolidate those gains and to continue this amazing record of success. Even in these early days, I have found that the people of this university are determined to see us succeed.

By any account, this is a great place to be.

I began this speech talking to our graduates of 2009 and I would like to close by relaying what I hope will prove to be sound advice. When I first started to coach my children in hockey and soccer, I formulated two goals for them and their teammates: work hard and have fun. Over the years I came to realize that more was needed from them. Each of them had to try to make a difference to their team: making the pass that led to a goal; making the play that saved a goal; or scoring a goal. And so I asked each member of each team to do just that: work hard, have fun, make a difference.

I also came to realize that what I was asking of my children and their teammates applied equally well to me. So I will be working hard, having fun and doing my best to make a difference to UNB as its 18th President. I hope for the same of all of you in your roles as supporters and friends of New Brunswick and its university.

The Higher Education and its Value in Practical Life was the subject of the Alumni Oration delivered at the Encoenia by Dr. H. S. Bridges, Superintendent of Schools at St. John.

He said in part:

A college education aims to accomplish two comprehensive objects which run into and are in a measure complementary to each other—first, the training of the student's powers both intellectual and moral, since these cannot wisely be disassociated and secondly, the cultivating and broadening of the student's intelligence by introducing him to a wide range of knowledge in language and literature, in science of all kinds, in history, in economics, in mathematics and philosophy.

A college training also aims to develop a man's self-making powers, that he may fashion himself and his life according to no narrow pattern, and to impart to him the faculty, as some one has aptly expressed it of "individual, initiative" which other things being equal is the key to success. A liberal education cannot it is true develop this power in a man if it does not already exist in him in a latent rudimentary form—since a college education does not profess to manufacture such a power to order, or to make bricks without straw. This self-making power includes the masonry of one's self, of one's own faculties, the ability to control and direct them with a sustained and intelligent energy, to whatever work the circumstances of life or his own inclination may summon a man.

It is training such as this which in Germany permeates the whole fabric of society, the army, professional life, literature and science, and which has given to the Germans their acknowledged supremacy in so many lines of activity. And it would be well for Canada if her young men, instead of relying on the many adventitious aids to success supplied by a new and rapidly growing country, will prefer to submit to that rigid prolonged discipline which in the long run is the only sure road to the highest eminence in any line of work.

The Earl of Derby in his oration on "Life and Culture" which he delivered on assuming the Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow, made the following remarks which merit special attention at the present day when vocational education is growing to be the popular fad, "The aim of a liberal education ought not to be to fit men for this or that special profession exclusively, but to supply such acquirements and to sharpen such faculties as shall be useful in any walk of life. Law, medicine, architecture, engineering, practical art—all these are pursuits of the highest usefulness and even necessity, but the architect has no particular use for law, nor the lawyer for architecture. What they both want, what they both have a use for is accuracy of thought, clearness of expression and that indefinable something, excluding pedantry on the one hand and vulgar coarseness on the other, which marks the man to whom literature has been more than the amusement of a casual hour."

Aiming to accomplish this all-round training of the whole man, the college and university are making more and more of the study of the great literature of the world, modern as well as ancient, inasmuch as these are not only the expression of the best life of the race, but also furnish the most generous inspiration to that which is noblest and best in life.

In this connection I may be allowed to quote the words of the late James Russell Lowell, poet and true statesman as well: "It is only through literature," said he "that we become complete men, for there and there alone, we learn what man is and what man may be for it is nothing else than the autobiography of mankind." Ennius too was right when he claimed to have three souls, because he understood three languages.

While increasing attention has been, paid to the modern languages and literatures, no system of education that calls itself liberal, unless it is willing to be regarded as scientifically insufficient, will omit to give an important place to the Greek and Latin classics which, especially the former, have proved not merely their own inherent vitality, but also their power to communicate life. I am a firm believer in keeping the ancient classics substantially where they have always been in the scheme of a truly liberal education; and I am sure that our colleges made a serious mistake some twenty-five years ago when they allowed the substitution of the modern languages for the ancient classics. It cannot be denied that the ancient classical languages, and especially Greek, are on account of their very construction and the superiority of their equipment, by far the best media for the study of language and for acquiring the ability to appreciate and understand what is best in old literature. Even those who oppose the study of the classics will seldom be found to deny that in conciseness, in dignity of style and in felicity of expression, the great writers of antiquity have never been equalled. In this connection permit me to quote two eloquent tributes to the value of the ancient classics, the first from the pen of Dr. Hamilton Wright Mabie, one of the accomplished editors of The Outlook; the second from an address of Judge Storey the most eminent jurist of his time in the United States. "There is no grander entrance to the great world of thought," says Dr. Mabie, "than the Great Literature. Universities are broadening their courses to meet the multiplied demands of modern knowledge and to fit men for the varied pursuits of modern life. For those who desire familiarity with human life in its broadest expression and especially for those who seek familiarity with the literary spirit and mastery of the literary art, Greek must hold its place in the curriculum to the end of time. Greek literature holds its place not because scholars have combined to keep alive its traditions and make familiarity with it the bond of the fellowship of culture, but because it is the faithful reflection of the life of a race who faced the world on all sides with mastery, intelligence and power."

"He who studies English literature" says Judge Storey, "without the lights of classical learning loses half the charms of its sentiments and style, of its forces and feelings, of its delicate touches, of its delightful allusions, of its illustrative associations. Who that meditates over the strains of Milton does not feel that he drank deep at"Siloah's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God,"that the fires of his magnificent mind were lighted by coals from ancient altars? It is no exaggeration to declare that he who proposes to abolish classical studies, proposes to render in a greater measure inert and unedifying the mass of English literature for three centuries; to rob us of much of the glory of the past, and much of the instruction of future ages; to annihilate associates which are interwoven with our best sentiments, and which give to distant times and countries a presence and reality as if they were in fact our own."

Another very important branch of the curriculum of the modern university is that of science. The science of nature and the science of matter and mind, are studied now as they were never studied before, and that too both in their abstract and concrete relations, more especially the former, since the abstract must always form the basis of all solid permanent advance in the sciences. Hence, those in our colleges and universities who are devoting their lives to the pursuit of abstract science, are rendering to the world a most practical though often unappreciated service. They are doing more, they are training their students in the methods of scientific investigation when often necessities of practical life. They have a direct bearing on the varied great universities of the land which are likewise conducting the study of history, both ancient and modern, in a more rational and scientific way than formerly, for history is not studied now as a mass of events that bear no relation to each other but as events which illustrate the development of the race, and therefore full of practical instruction for the statesman and citizen alike. It is highly probable that in the lapse of years most of us have forgotten the demonstrations of the higher mathematics but their influence upon the logical faculty can never be lost, as it remains a permanent possession of the mind often proving valuable in many unsuspected ways. It is said that the speeches of Abraham Lincoln were remarkable for their clearness and logical force. One day after he had made a great speech in the campaign of 1859, he was met in the train by a gentleman who, after expressing his admiration for the logical clearness of his speech of the previous evening, ventured to ask Lincoln how he had acquired this power. "Well," said Lincoln, "when I was studying to be a lawyer, I found that I had no comprehension of what it meant to absolutely prove a thing. Conscious that this difficulty must be removed, if I would succeed in my chosen profession I dropped my law books and went home somewhat discouraged, but taking up my Euclid I proceeded to master it. Then I thoroughly understood what it meant to demonstrate a proposition and to do it clearly and logically. I then went back to my law studies and found that my difficulty had entirely disappeared." Lincoln had thus obtained one of the most valuable benefits of truly liberal education.

Nor is the education which our higher institutions of learning give, one of books and class-room alone. At these institutions young mien of all grades and varieties of talent and character from different sections of the country are represented. What then, I ask, can be of greater practical value than the intercourse of these students among themselves broadening, as it does, their minds, sharpening their faculties, imparting a knowledge of men and helping each one of them to form an accurate estimate of his own abilities and powers? Side by side with the education acquired from lectures and recitations, there is going on in every college that education which comes from a vital contact of the minds and hearts of the students with one another and indirectly with the world around them. As Augustine Birrell, who is himself a distinguished example of the university man in practical life, has so happily expressed it: "It is within the crumbling walls of colleges that mind meets with mind, that permanent friendships are formed and lofty ambitions stirred. It is indeed a great and stirring tradition."

It must be acknowledged, however, that the mere cultivation of the intellect is not the only thing to which attention should be paid in our higher institutions of learning? Perhaps there has never been a period in the history of the world when character was of such supreme importance in practical life as the present one. The gross materialism of an age which is mainly concerned with the accumulation of wealth will surely be fatal to moral growth and true culture if the moral balance in education is not preserved. When that great philosopher, Herbert Spencer, was in the United States some years before his death, some one asked him if he did not think that the general diffusion of knowledge would tend to fit men for free institutions. "No, certainly not," he replied, "that is essentially a question of character, and only in a secondary degree a, question of knowledge. The idea that mere education is a panacea for political evils is a universal delusion."

Had all the higher institutions of learning throughout the United States paid as much attention to the development of character as they might have done in the past fifty years, would we not now be spared the sorry spectacle which the senate of a great nation presents in their attempt to recede from the obligations imposed by an international treaty? Again, if in Canada, our educators laid more emphasis on the maintenance of moral obligations, would not such a course exercise a powerful influence in preventing1 the scandalous things that are often done under the plea of practical politics? What shall I say of the transactions recently brought to light by the Socialist party in Germany, who have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that a great manufacturing concern has used every effort in its power to foment unfriendly feelings between two great nations, simply for the sake of increasing the sale of their weapons of destruction? Is not this a result of that gross mercenary spirit which is permeating the whole fabric of society on both sides of the Atlantic, and which our higher institutions should resist with all their power? Though it is confessedly their duty to cultivate the intellect, they should never lose sight of the fact that they are also responsible for the development of character, ever bearing in mind that a man’s usefulness in life depends far more on his character than on his intellectual ability, and that it is righteousness and righteousness alone that exalteth a nation.

From what has been said in the course of this address, it will be observed that the word practical has been used not in that narrow utilitarian sense in which it is so often employed, but in a wider and more liberal signification. In my opinion, nothing can possess a higher practical value for any man than that which makes him a man in the fullest sense of the word; which gives him habits of clear, systematic and independent thought; which sharpens iris penetration, gives vigor to his powers of reasoning, chastens and refines his taste, and confers upon him the priceless gift of clear and forcible utterance. Considered from this point of view, the studies of the College course, however, abstract, barren or profitless they may appear to the superficial observer, possess a practical value of the very highest and most inestimable character, since their beneficial effects are spread over the entire life, and are daily manifest in every variety of circumstances by which men are surrounded.

May it please Your Honor; Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President and Members of the Senate, Mr. President and Members of the Associated Alumni, Ladies and Gentlemen:—

Those of us who were present at last year's encoenial exercises had the pleasure of listening to the remarks of a learned and eloquent prelate, who spoke a parting word to the members of the class then graduated, and whose address must have proved an inspiration to those for whom it was intended. Truthfully I can say that I wish some one better fitted than myself, had been selected to perform a similar duty at this encoenia. For I must confess that outside of those places where my duties oblige me to speak now and then, I am little used to speaking in public places. And there is a reason for that. There are those, as you know, an important part of whose business in life consists in making public speeches. Except that we may disagree with what they say, these people are to be subjected to no hostile criticism. But where one belongs to a class of public servants who, upon most questions are expected to maintain a golden silence, it will be seen that his case is different. There is a wise old saying which it is always well to bear in one's mind, because in times of perplexity or doubt it offers a safe refuge: Whilst you are silent, no one has any business with you; but when you speak, you must be ready with the proof.

It is only right perhaps, that I should at once relieve any anxiety or uneasiness which you may feel in regard to the probable length of these remarks, by stating that I have been given a time limit, beyond which I cannot encroach. So that in a sense, I am compelled to make them short, and am therefore entitled to no particular credit for their brevity. After the four years spent in these college halls, you, members of the graduating class, are now going out, well equipped, I have no doubt, for the battle of life. Up to this period of your lives everything has been but a preparation. What then, shall I say to you upon your graduation day, in order to encourage you, even in a small measure, for the work upon which you are entering? It is this. Be not afraid. Courageously face the world, and in any part you have to play in the affairs of life, no matter what your role may be, endeavor to live up to the high ideals which have been here inculcated, and strive to do your duty. And what is duty? "Stern daughter of the voice of God," Wordsworth calls it. Duty, the philosophers tell us, is a debt owed to the rational nature of which the spokesman and representative is conscience, which emphatically calls for the satisfaction of the claim. The path of activity proper and congenial to every being is fixed and dictated by the nature which the being possesses. The Gospel vindicates the Divine origin of duty, and declares that its fulfilment constitutes the very essence of religion. "Duty" says Holmes, "draw the great circle which includes all else within it."

Passing over the paramount duty which we owe to our Creator, and the duty toward ourselves, and speaking only of the duties we owe to others—to the organized civil society in which we live, these last may be summed up in the Christian precept "Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself." If we search other systems of doctrine and belief which leave out altogether the outstanding central fact of Christianity, we shall find that the Christian idea of duty is nevertheless strongly emphasized and insisted on. In illustration of this we need but point to the Chinese, who claim to be an eminently practical people. The teaching of Confucius is said to suit their views exactly, because they say that they are not sure of what is to take place after death, and Confucianism has nothing whatever to do with the question of a future life. The sole aim of Confucius teaching is to make men desirable members of society. In order to become such they have to do good to others by performing the duties of their position, and at the same time lead good lives themselves by practising the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety and truthfulness.

The Christian idea of duty also will be found to pervade the Mahometan system of belief. In his estimate of the prophet whose word has been for twelve centuries the life guide of a fifth part of the whole kindred of mankind, but whose sensual paradise is such as shocks all spiritual feeling in us. Thomas Carlyle, speaking of the Mahometan conception of rewards and punishments, says that "however gross and material they may be, they are an emblem of an everlasting truth, not al-ways so well remembered elsewhere. The gross, sensual paradise of Mahomet; the great, enormous day of judgment he perpetually insists on; what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination, of that grand spiritual facts, and the "beginning of facts, which it is ill for us, too, if we do not all know and feel; the Infinite nature of Duty?"

If we view the subject from the standpoint of patriotism solely, we shall find it to be just as true when considered in relation to the arts of peace, as it is when considered in connection with the arts of war, equally true spoken amid these peaceful surroundings, as it was when spoken from the quarter deck of the frigate VICTORY, more than one hundred years ago, that every man is expected to do his duty. The sovereignty, which we call the state, expects today, and has a right to expect, nay, has a right to insist, that every man and every woman too, shall perform the duties incident to their position in the life of the state, and give at least a portion of their time and of their abilities towards the betterment and uplifting of the society of which they form part.

Jules Simon, the French publicist, says it is a mistake to consider oneself an honest man when he has merely earned the right to say, in the words of the popular proverb, that be bas never harmed a fellow creature. The moral law obliges us not only to do no harm to our fellow men, it obliges us to aid them. It is not enough that we do not destroy them, we must help them to live; nor to respect their property, we should share ours with them. In a word, we owe them in equal measure, justice and help.

The civil law which is so minute and precise in what it forbids, is timorous and incomplete in what it Prescribes. The more timid the written law should be when a question of aid arises, so much the more should we insist on the duties prescribed by the moral law. The educated man who might enlighten his fellow man, but who through indifference or pride, locks up within himself his learning, is not fulfilling his rightful destiny. Of what avail are men of genius if this genius is allowed to be silent, to become as naught? Or of what use are the preachers, the teachers of the people, if no warning from the dangers from which religion is meant to protect us is heard from the pulpits. Of what benefit is an Edison if all his wonderful discoveries in the domain of electrical science are kept closeted within his own fertile brain? Or of what use is a Friedmann, if the result of his patient investigations in the field of medicine in an endeavor to find a cure for tuberculosis, is withheld from the hundreds of thousands who suffer from the Great White Plague? "A beggar must die at the baker's door without touching the bread: which does not belong to him; such is the right of ownership in all its terrible rigor. The written law sanctions it in this form and does not oblige the rich to give to a dying man; but the moral law obliges him imperiously to do so. If he enjoys his superfluity in the presence of a dying man, he is responsible for his death. Christian morality teaches us eloquently that the rich are only the treasurers of the poor; a truly Divine saying, and enough in itself, if engraved on every heart, to prove the salvation of society."

Speaking to the students of Harvard University a few years ago, Professor Van. Dyke told them that there is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher. There is a nobler character than that which is merely incorruptible. It is the character which acts as an antidote and preventative of corruption. Peerlessly to speak the words which bear witness to righteousness, truth and purity; patiently to do the deeds which strengthen virtue and kindle hope in your fellow men; generously to lend a hand to those who are trying to climb upward; faithfully to give your support and your personal help to the efforts which are making to elevate and purify the social life of the world-that is the way to make your lives interesting, savory and powerful.

Today you become partners in a splendid heritage; and sharers in the potentialities, the prestige and the traditions of a university which has done much for the life of the province, and for the life of Canada. With pride you can point to the many of its graduates who have found their way into the public, the educational and the professional life of the country; men who are taking no inconsiderable part in the making of the country's history. It is not to be expected of course, that all of you, or even a considerable number of you, should emulate the example or follow in the footsteps of those who have chosen public careers; but all of you can, if you will, sï mould your lives as to bring no reproach upon your university. Wherever your future careers may be found; whether in seats of learning or legislative halls, in the learned professions or in the counting houses of the marts of commerce; in the workshop, the forest or the field; remember your obligations will be measured according to your opportunities and your worthiness according to your obligations. "To live is to act; to fight at one's post the battle of life; leader or soldier, it matters little, so long as one does one's duty valiantly. The strength which God has given you, be it great or small, is a gift truly divine. You should neither let it perish nor profane it by unworthy uses." As expressed in one of your classics, "To be nameless in worthy deeds, exceeds an infamous history." The men that have been happiest and the men that are best remembered are the men that have done good in the world. So also it is true, that it is not the good that we have done for ourselves, but the good that we have done for others, around which our pleasantest thoughts centre.

A few years ago there passed away a sovereign of the mightiest empire the world has ever seen. That his influence upon the world during his all too short reign, was wholly good is attested by the fact that already his name has gone down into history as Edward the Peacemaker. We all can remember his last words, simple, but pregnant with a wealth of meaning, which reechoed round the world: "I think I have done my duty."

In wishing you God speed in the work which awaits you, let me assure you that the senate of the university, if I may be permitted to speak in its behalf, shall always follow your careers with a lively and a kindly interest. And let me, in conclusion express the hope that in your after lives you may recall the years spent here as the most profitable of your whole existence, and that when the evening comes, which comes to all alike, in glancing back in retrospect over well spent lives, you, too, may be able truthfully to say in the words of England's King, that you have done your duty.

May it please Your Honor; Mr. President and Members of the Senate, Mr.
Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen:—

The valedictories of the past few years have differed from those which preceded them both in form and intention. Previously this address couched in simple language, was designed to narrate the accomplishments of the past and to suggest both to the senate and students improvements for the future. No doubt as time went on new ideas become scarce, old subjects hackneyed; at any rate there has been a change in the type of valedictory, and latterly one marked by beautiful language and imagery has been the vogue. This year I propose to revert to the former custom and to state as simply and briefly as I can the improvements of the past year and to lay before your consideration some of our present problems and their possible solution.

The past year has been marked by advance and good fortune for the University of New Brunswick. The recently inaugurated lectures in law, which enable students to secure credit for one year at a law college, have been attended by a large number of students and have proved in every way eminently satisfactory.

The annual government grant upon which this institution so largely depends for its maintenance was increased at the last session of parliament by over $2,000; this additional revenue will be largely expended in necessary equipment and advances in salaries.

Two generous donations have been made to the university in the past year; Judge Barker bestowed one, the sum of $600, which will be used to further extend the library; the other, a scholarship of $100 a year, was the gift of Dr. A. P. Crocket.

Largely through the kindness of the senate the old grandstand on College Field has been replaced by a safer and more commodious structure, which with proper care should last many generations of students.

One change has occurred in the personnel of the faculty. Professor Gordon, who succeeded Professor Day in the chair of English and history, came to the university highly recommended; he has proved a valuable member of the faculty and has shown himself to be in the true sense a scholar and a gentleman.

In competition with other colleges the students have had fair though not brilliant success. We made a good showing in both football and hockey; ours was the only team to score against the football champions of the Maritime Provinces; in hockey we tied for second place in the intercollegiate league. For the third time in succession the debating team won on argument in the intercollegiate debate; for the second time in the last three years it lost the decision. The defeat is surely obvious; hard work and ability are indispensable, but unless they are accompanied by a graceful delivery will not secure success—to the debaters of next year, we say, work as determinedly; think as closely; but also train—and victory should be assured.

All the student societies have enjoyed a successful year. General meetings have been well attended and for the most part harmonious; debates have proved as strong a feature of college life as usual; mock parliament was again the source of much entertainment and of considerable profit. The social events of the year have been attended with the usual degree of success.

So much for the advances and activities of the past year; I wish now to speak of the needs of the university; these I conceive to be three in number.

The University of New Brunswick possesses advantages—natural and acquired—as great as those of any other college in the Maritime Provinces. The site of the university, an ideal city in the centre of the province, could not be improved; our grounds, our buildings, our equipment are excellent and are steadily being bettered; our curriculum and staff of instructors is admittedly as strong, if not stronger, than that of the competing colleges, yet in spite of all these advantages the attendance is not increasing, but is rather slightly falling off. When our class entered college, the number of students was one hundred and sixty, today it is but one hundred and fifty. The causes for this fact—for causes there surely are—I believe to be four:—

The University of New Brunswick is avowedly non-sectarian. A large percentage of possible students prefer a college of their own denomination. We can hold out no religious inducements and are consequently at a disadvantage in competing for students.

The second reason is more important; it can moreover be remedied—we don't advertise enough. Other universities devote a large sum each year to newspaper advertisement; means are also provided whereby professors can visit the high schools and make known the advantages their respective colleges afford. Almost all the money annually appropriated for advertising at our university is required for the college calendar. We would suggest therefore that if the college is to expand, a much larger sum be set aside each year for the purpose of bringing the university more fully to the attention of prospective students—that this be done moreover even though it necessitates curtailment of extension in other directions, for without students and many of them, the university cannot progress.

The third obstacle in the way of an increased attendance is the reputation, which students of this university have acquired for severe initiation. Every fall reports of our hazing proceedings are mooted in the newspapers of the province. A highly exaggerated opinion of their severity prevails in every section. As a consequence nervous parents, who would otherwise prefer to send their sons to our institution, select one of the rival colleges. To superficial observers I may seem to lay undue emphasis on this fact, but those who are trying to extend the popularity of the university, appreciate its very great importance. The remedy lies largely with the students; the only way to effectually combat the prevailing impression is to abolish initiation root and branch—a drastic suggestion some will say; possibly, but reflect: Is the game worth the candle? Do the fun and excitement, harmless though they may be in themselves, compensate for the injury the university sustains in consequence? The matter is worth serious consideration on the part of next year's students—we missed our opportunity for reform, how broad gauged and progressive is the class of 1914?

The final reason for our lack of students is old and much hackneyed, but nevertheless very important,—the absence of a residency. Schoolboys, if they think of such matters, conceive college to be a place where you live as well as study—where the social life and advantages are equally as important as the contents of the curriculum or the personnel of the faculty. Consequently when students of the University try to induce High School pupils to come to the University of New Brunswick, they usually meet with the answer "I should prefer to go to a college with a residency;" and they generally do. Parents also favor the residential university because it affords greater opportunities for faculty restraint and supervision.

These then are the most important reasons for our lack of increased attendance—our first need. Now let me say a few words in connection with what we conceive to be our second need—a residency. The undergraduates, from observations they have made of other Maritime Province universities, believe that residency would mean for us:
Increase in our numbers for reasons I have just given; consequent athletic success and heightened prestige. Our teams selected from one hundred and twenty-five students at present contend against those chosen from three and four hundred—that we are not oftener successful in naturally not strange.
Residency would mean increased co-operation among the students and a greater diffusion of work— both essential elements for consistent success. Under present conditions student effort is scattered; the labor is borne by three or four men.
Residency would promote a more intense college spirit—a valuable asset—the natural result of closer intimacy and more concentrated endeavor

"But of what avail all this," it is remarked, "even though it be true? We have no means of providing a residency." In this regard permit a suggestion: four of the Maritime Province universities—Dalhousie, Acadia, Kings and Mount Allison—have very recently raised large sums for purposes of expansion by means of forward movements—through contributions solicited from graduates and friends. Why not a forward movement for the University of New Brunswick with a residency as its goal? Several objections may be made to this proposal; that such a movement would be without the denominational support which has been so largely instrumental in the success of similar schemes; that we have no large city interested in our welfare such a the other non-sectarian college Dalhousie had; that ours is a government institution and for that reason is cut off from assistance from other sources. All these objections contain a large degree of truth; on the other hand, I would urge that we have a large alumni—six hundred and fifty, no less—many very prosperous, all strongly attached, to their Alma Mater. Why not give them a chance? And again, the very fact that the University of New Brunswick is a state university should be incentive enough for all patriotic men of the province to lend us material and generous assistance. Why not give them a chance? The need is surely pressing.

Now I have already mentioned two of the most important needs of the university (1) more students; (2) a residency; there is a third, more professors. The engineering students are seventy-two in number and thus comprise, approximately, one-half the total student membership. Their instruction for the first two years is shared largely by almost all members of the faculty but in the last two years the greater part of the burden falls on one or two men—this makes it impossible for the work though of a high standard, to be as efficient as possible. We would suggest, therefore that an assistant professor of engineering be appointed, as soon as the resources of the university will stand the additional strain.

A similar condition of affairs exists in the department of forestry; each year since it was established there has been an increasing number of forestry students until this year there are twenty-two in all. The splendid positions which the senior foresters have secured will very probably induce more to enter that course next year. But at present we have but one professor in forestry subjects, the amount of work he has to cover is excessive and will steadily increase. An assistant professor of forestry is one of our most pressing needs.

A few words now on student problems:

The question of student levies has for a long time past caused much perplexity. Up to the present the students have themselves assessed and collected the money spent in their activities; but this system has resulted both in extravagant expenditure and in uncollected levies. Two plans have accordingly been suggested by means of which the defects of the present system might be remedied: One proposal has been to have the Registrar collect the levies with the regular college fees and, in consideration for this service to give the faculty supervision over student expenditure. A preferable scheme, however, would be to have the Senate share in the student expenses provided that those expenses be restricted to certain limits and be made under close faculty observation. Either of these plans would be very superior to that which is at present in vogue; we sincerely trust one of them will meet with favorable consideration from the Senate.

A few remarks about offices and elections to offices would perhaps be timely. In the presidencies of the different societies and in the captaincies of the different teams there is a training at once profitable and exacting. The tendency of late has been to place upon two or three men the duties which should be performed by many, to turn what, if properly distributed would be enjoyable privileges, into burdensome tasks. Nine out of every ten students could do the work if the responsibility were placed upon them—our advice therefore is spread your offices, give many the opportunity, eliminate overburdening and thus get better results.

Upon the real students of energy and ambition upon the men who follow knowledge for its own sake as well as for its rewards, there has recently come an epidemic for honors—the result partly of personal ambition, partly of competition. This malady is gradually losing its force and well it is that is so: Many subjects mean diversification of energy, the loss of concentration, the development of superficiality; especially is this true because upon those who carry the heaviest courses usually falls the greater bulk of student responsibilities. The true student, who is seeking the greatest benefit and satisfaction from his course, should take the first two years to discover his bent; he should then pick his course and concentrate, know his subject thoroughly, live with it, in this way he will develop the genuine student attitude and will enjoy to the full studious satisfaction.

To the undergraduates as a body we would say this: Make your criterion “the welfare of the university.” If you set up such a standard, by far the greater number of your problems will solve themselves automatically; all strife between the faculty and yourselves will cease; the demagogue will lose his power.

In conclusion a word to you, fellow classmates. After four years of effort, pleasant perhaps to some of us, toilsome and irkesome to others; we have at last reached our goal; this is the day which hitherto bounded our horizon of thought; but as we have been passing through the final stages of our course the idea has gradually, with ever increasing intensity forced its way borne that there is another field of endeavor awaiting us—one where the toil is more excessive, competition keener, but where the incentives and rewards are more substantial and permanent. We, a class of forty men and women, leave academic halls for the sterner work of the mart and the forum, the plain and the forest, each according to his calling, at a most fortune time in our country's history. Up to the present Canada has been, in a stage of preparation when toil has been severe, rewards doubtful and not over abundant; now, however, the preparatory stage is past, Canada and her people are entering upon the full enjoyment of their marvellous natural dowry; nowhere in the world today are there such opportunities for ability and resolution.

But in such a country when the rewards are great the dangers are likewise acute; dangers of materialism, ο shortsightedness and corruption. The inherent duty of University men and women lies in combating those pernicious tendencies; they must preserve the ideal; they must teach that the present profitable should always be weighed against the welfare of the future; the whole object of the past four years has not been to instill knowledge—that has been a secondary aim,—but rather to provide scope; to inspire ideals; we are consequently versed in theory, ignorant of practice; the next few years will bring us close to the practical, let us see to it that we retain the outlook which only the broad theory can give.

We are fortunate in our alma mater; the University of New Brunswick is an institution of proud traditions; among her graduates are counted men of the finest calibre, of world-wide reputation. In our hands rests her fame for the future; let us make sure it be not sullied but if possible further extended and elevated.

Lastly as "Sapere Aude," the motto of this university were the first words to greet us when we entered these halls and for some have contained a source of inspiration throughout our course, so now as we stand assembled together perchance for the last time, let us impress those words "Sapere Aude"—dare to learn— in our minds, enshrine them in our hearts and if in the future, though we shall no longer be students of a university, we live in accordance with their command, success should be assured.